CircleCI raises $100 million for automated app testing and deployment

Continuous integration and delivery platform CircleCI today announced that it secured a $100 million tranche, which will be used to bolster the development of the company’s product suite, according to CEO Jim Rose. The series E round is a vote of confidence in CircleCI’s automated approach to developer operations (DevOps), which entails the tools a company uses to build, test, and deploy software.

“As people have suddenly been forced into a remote-only work set up, there’s been a big push to accelerate efforts around automation. CircleCI is in a position to provide the framework for a full DevOps toolchain to help developer teams navigate this ‘new normal,’ many of whom are experiencing remote-only work for the first time,” Rose told VentureBeat via email.

It’s been shown that DevOps impacts product readiness and customer happiness — 81% of executives recently surveyed by CA Technologies and Coleman Parks Research say they believe DevOps is critical to business transformation. Automated solutions like CircleCI’s ensure changes are tested before they’re shipped to reduce the need for manual bug squashing.

CircleCI develops a toolset that integrates with toolchains like Fastlane, Azure, Slack, Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise to create builds the minute code is committed. It automatically tests those builds in containers or virtual machine and notifies teams if issues arise, and it deploys passing builds to target environments such as Docker images or virtual Linux, Android, Windows, or macOS machines. Metrics like time to recovery, change failure rate, and whether a build is passing or failing get passed along via insights endpoints.

Dev teams can define and orchestrate how execution runs and take advantage of Docker support to build images from registries. They’re able to specify required compute and memory resources and tap caching options to speed up builds with save and restore points. And using the new insights API, they can track job status by isolating failing tests and flaky workflows; find out which workflows are taking the longest and identify opportunities for caching, parallelization, and convenience images; and optimize usage with insight into credit spend per job and workflow.

CircleCI’s SSH support lets managers or dev team members run jobs in local environments, and its security tools — which include LDAP for user management, audit logging, and full-level virtual machine isolation — shield code from illicit tampering. On the analytics side of things, an interactive visual dashboard collates metrics in one place, including the number of failed builds and the slowest tests.

The CircleCI platform can be installed on a private server, and the company offers a managed cloud service that includes instant access to feature releases and automatic upgrades. No matter where it’s installed, CircleCI supports any language that builds on Linux or macOS, including C++, Javascript, .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

It’s been a banner year for CircleCI, which recorded an uptick in the number of daily jobs on its platform to 1.8 million. CircleCI recently expanded its technology partner program (CircleCI Orbs) to 22,000 organizations across 65,000 repositories and 18 million pipelines, and it opened an office in London. (Orbs, which launched in 2018, allows teams and devs to share preferred configurations by packaging commands, executors, and jobs into lines of code.)

This latest investment in San Francisco-based CircleCI which was cofounded in 2011 by Allen Rohner and Paul Biggar was co-led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures. It brings the startup’s total raised to $215 million following its latest $56 million funding round in July 2019.

CircleCI has around 300 employees worldwide, and it expects to have between 400 to 500 by 2021. It counts Avvo, NBC Universal, Facebook, Ford, Spotify, Citigroup, Aetna, Unilever, GigaOm, Coinbase, Sony, GoPro, Kickstarter, Segment, Percolate, and Conde Nast among its 30,000 customers, with 800,000 users.