The Founder

about us | our history | our products

MSkold AB was founded in 2015, but the story behind it starts a decade earlier — in the trenches of software development, where a passion for tooling and developer experience quietly took shape.

Mattias Sköld — The founders story

I have been building tools for development teams since 2005 — first as a consultant, then as an open source contributor, and eventually as the founder of MSkold AB. The thread connecting all of it has always been the same: I find friction that slows teams down, and I build something to remove it.

I started my career in software development in the early 1990s, but in 2005, my career took a turn as I started working with and consulting on Team Foundation Server, the earliest version of what would become Azure DevOps. Working directly with development teams gave me an unusually close view of where the real pain was — not the headline features, but the small everyday gaps that nobody had quite got around to fixing. Those early years produced a stream of open source utilities, reports, and Visual Studio extensions, each one scratching a real itch for a real team.

In 2010 I joined the ALM Rangers, Microsoft’s community of practice for Azure DevOps, and spent almost 10 years contributing to guidance materials used by teams worldwide — including the Branching Guide, the Test Manager Guide, the Reporting Guide and a range of practical tooling. That work was a huge learning and development opportunity, learning from a community of gigants. It shaped how I think about software development, it also put in close contact with the people at Microsoft who were building the platform I would later build on top of.

By the time I founded my business in late 2015, I had a decade of context most extension developers simply don’t have. I knew the platform deeply, I knew what teams needed, and I knew where the marketplace gaps were. That foundation is what made it possible to build quickly, partner directly with Microsoft, and earn the trust of more than 30,000 organizations worldwide.

I still consult on Azure Devops, talk to customers, and make decisions about what we build next. If you reach out, you’ll likely hear back from me directly.

Read about what the company has built since 2015 on our History page.