RedHawk Ventures completes investment in Pieces for Developers

Effortless Workflow Mastery: Introducing Pieces 🧩

Redhawk Ventures just closed an investment with Pieces. Pieces, led by CEO Tsavo Knott, provides a developer-centric platform for organizing code snippets and documentation, catering exclusively to the developer community. With a focus on streamlining workflows, Pieces aims to improve productivity and collaboration within development teams. The company's strong team, innovative product offering, and strategic growth plans proved itself as worthy of an investment for Redhawk Ventures.

In this article, we interview co-founder Tsavo Knott and speak about Pieces, Miami University, and building a startup.

But before we get into the interview here’s some background on Pieces.

What is Pieces?🕹️

Pieces for Developers is a revolutionary platform designed to enhance every aspect of a developer's workflow. It serves as a centralized hub where developers can seamlessly conduct research, collaborate with colleagues, and write, review, and reuse code—all within a single, intuitive interface.

Founders 👥 

Tsavo Knott- Miami University Alumni, Bachelor’s Degree in Game and Interactive Media Design, Computer Science

Mack Myers- Miami University Almuni, Former co-founder of Mesh

Suresh Khanna- Stanford Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Public Policy, Northwestern MBA, Ex-Google, Ex-Adroll Group, President of Treez

🎤

What is Pieces for someone who has no Idea?

Fundamentally, Pieces aims to simplify the way that professional creators interact with their workflow. If you're a developer, you're in three locations. You're in the browser, the IDE, or your design tool, or wherever your tool is, and your collaborative environment, like Google Chat, Slack, or Teams. What Pieces is really focused on is the work-in-progress journey, where you're interacting with all different types of materials like code snippets, screenshots, related links, the list goes on. We want to have a place for these things to live, be deeply enriched automatically with AI, and also capture that workflow context. So we set out on a mission to forget what it looks like to capture and organize things at the file level. Let's take it a bit lower and let's look at the piece. Let's look at the fragment. So, how can Pieces be a home for the small things and their workflow context? Moreover, how can Pieces proactively identify what's important to you or what you're interacting with a lot and save those things? I think that is the true motivation of Pieces: we wanted to build a proactive, helpful tool that understands your workflow and the things you're interacting with and gives you the right things at the right time, in addition to saving those things for later for you.

How did the idea of Pieces come about? What was the aha moment?

Before Pieces, I founded a company called Mesh My Campus, which was basically Slack for higher education before Slack was a mainstream product. We built a file-uploading system for Mesh My Campus, and it had to be high-performance because all of these projects were massive. The funny part about that is I don't need to send you a five-gigabyte project or an entire code base when I can send you a snippet, an artboard, a layer, or something smaller. That's really where we started to consider this idea that projects are getting too big, files are getting too big. Can we interact— save, search, share, reference, reuse, generate—on a smaller level? That was the “aha” moment for Pieces.

You've had experience in building multiple startups, how do you see this as an edge when scaling a startup compared to someone who hasn't had any experience yet?

Every startup is a different beast. It’s not really possible to see every hurdle in the race to scale a startup coming, but one advantage I think I’ve developed over a first-time founder is the ability to spot truly excellent talent. Every person on the Pieces team is an absolute savage and operates at the top of their game. A world-class team will give any founder an edge when scaling a company.

Where do you see Pieces in 5 years?

In a team that moves as quickly as ours and a field as rapid as AI, it’s hard to predict where Pieces will be in 5 years. We do know that we want to be revolutionizing the way that all professional creatives work, including developers, designers, animators, engineers, writers, and even more, and we want to be doing it with almost no effort from the user. We can proactively save, enrich, and surface the exact piece of information that you need at the exact time you need it, which will change the way we all work forever. Our AI is truly helpful because it fully understands the entire context around a person's workflow, and not only provides high-quality insights when you ask for them, but anticipates what you need when you need it, and delivers that value before you even ask.

Where are you guys in the funding process?

In 2021, we raised a $4M Seed Round led by Drive Capital. This year we raised a $13.4M Series A from world-class investors including Drive Capital, Cintrifuse Capital, and RedHawk Ventures.

Let's go back to your time in Miami, how was it? How do you think Miami supported your entrepreneurial interest?

Miami was world-class when it came to incubation and acceleration of not only what types of entrepreneurial ventures I wished to embark on; but further, how my work outside of the classroom could supplement and complement work inside the classroom.

What was your favorite class at Miami?

CSE 274 Data Structures & Algorithms with Norm Krumpe was one of my favorite classes. My favorite part was the competition at the end where we tried to see who could build the most performant data structure to index all the words in a dictionary.

How do you see Redhawk Ventures benefitting Pieces?

I think it’s all about community and network. When it comes to hiring, customer pipelines, etc., RedHawk is an invaluable resource and serves as a champion and strategic voice throughout this journey.

Redhawk Ventures is eagerly anticipating the future advancements of Pieces and the impact it will have on streamlining workflows for professional creators. As we look ahead, we see tremendous potential for Pieces to further revolutionize how developers interact with their tools and collaborate with their teams.