Pivotal Labs (later VMware Tanzu Labs) was an

agile software development Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to software development, developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented ...

consulting firm A consulting firm or simply consultancy is a professional service firm that provides expertise and specialised labour for a fee, through the use of consultants. Consulting firms may have one employee or thousands; they may consult in a broad ra ...

headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. The company developed Pivotal Tracker workflow software. It was a division of

Pivotal Software Pivotal Software, Inc. was an American Multinational corporation, multinational software and Service (economics), services company based in San Francisco that provided Cloud computing, cloud platform hosting and consulting services. Since Novemb ...

History

The company was founded in 1989 by Rob Mee and Sherry Erskine. In 2008 Pivotal Labs released Pivotal Tracker, which was used as their internal project management and collaboration software. EMC acquired Pivotal Labs, and in March 2013, Pivotal Software was formed after spinning out of EMC and VMware. In October 2013, Pivotal acquired Toronto-based Xtreme Labs, a mobile app development company. Xtreme Labs' clients included

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and Groupon. In December 2019, Pivotal Labs was acquired by VMware and renamed VMware Tanzu Labs. In November 2023, VMware was acquired by Broadcom and Tanzu Labs was subsequently shut down in January 2025, with Pivotal Tracker retired in April 2025. In 2022, Rob Mee founded Mechanical Orchard, a company focused on modernizing legacy systems through incremental rewrites and AI-assisted development. Several early team members were also former Pivotal engineers, and the company draws heavily on Pivotal’s engineering practices, including test-driven development, pair programming, and iterative delivery. While Pivotal Labs primarily helped startups and enterprises build new software products, Mechanical Orchard applies similar principles to the challenge of transforming complex, business-critical systems. The startup has secured significant funding to support its mission, including a $24 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital in early 2024, and a $50 million Series B round led by GV (Google Ventures) in August 2024.

Products and Services

The company used pair programming while doing its software development and also consulted with other companies to help them use the method. The company provided consulting programming for several large technology organizations worldwide.

References

External links

Pivotal Tracker site

Pivotal Labs Practices
{{Dell Consulting firms established in 1989 1989 establishments in California 2012 mergers and acquisitions Pivotal Software 1989 establishments in the United States Companies established in 1989*

History

Products and Services

See also

References

External links