What Is Engineering Acceleration? The Metric VCs Are Starting to Track

Engineering acceleration is the rate of change in a startup's GitHub commit velocity — not how much code they write, but how much faster they are writing it compared to their own baseline. (To be clear: this is code-side momentum, GitHub commit velocity, not participation in a startup accelerator program like Y Combinator or Techstars.) A startup with 40 commits this period and 20 last period shows +100% acceleration. This metric has historically preceded fundraise announcements by three to six weeks because the underlying causes — post-raise hiring, product-market fit iteration, launch preparation — drive engineering output before they drive press coverage or Crunchbase entries.