ZenHub, the GitHub-centric project management service for development teams, today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed funding round from Canada’s BDC Capital and Ripple Ventures. This marks the first fundraise for the Vancouver, Canada-based startup after the team bootstrapped the service, which first launched back in 2014. Additional angel investors in this round include Adam Gross (former CEO of Heroku), Jiaona Zhang (VP Product at Webflow) and Oji Udezue (VP Product at Calendly).

In addition to announcing this funding round, the team also today launched its newest automation feature, which makes it easier for teams to plan the development sprints, something that is core to the Agile development process but often takes a lot of time and energy — something teams are better off spending on the actual development process.

“This is a really exciting kind of pivot point for us as a business and gives us a lot of ammunition, I think, to really go after our vision and mission a little bit more aggressively than we have even in the past,” ZenHub co-founder and CEO Aaron Upright told me. The team, he explained, used the beginning of the pandemic to spend a lot of time with customers to better understand how they were reacting to what was happening. In the process, customers repeatedly noted that development resources were getting increasingly expensive and that teams were being stretched even farther and under a lot of pressure.

ZenHub’s answer to this was to look into how it could automate more of the processes that constitute the most complex parts of Agile. Earlier this year, the company launched its first efforts in this area, with new tools for improving developer handoffs in GitHub and now, with the help of this new funding, it is putting the next pieces in place by helping teams automate their sprint planning.