Co-led by Australian investors OneVentures and AirTree, with participation from US-based General Catalyst, and Dom Pym, founder of digital bank Up; Buildkite will dedicate 100% of the funds to launch new developer-focused products and expand the company’s existing operations, marketing and sales teams.
Over the last nine years, Buildkite’s platform has quickly become the most performant way to build, test, and deploy software at scale. The platform was the first to introduce the hybrid CI/CD model in which customers host their testing and deployment pipelines on their own infrastructure while offloading the user experience for managing these pipelines to a cloud-powered interface. This provides DevOps teams the ability to achieve closer performance parity to production systems through utilization of their own resources while keeping their source code within their walls. Meanwhile development teams benefit from increased usability as compared to a fully self-hosted CI/CD alternative.
To date, the company has raised a total of $39 million USD and partnered with several Fortune 1000 companies, including Wayfair, Shopify, Slack, Twilio, Canva, and Lyft. The secret ingredient for scalable growth, Buildkite’s longevity and strong customer base is a testament to their successful approach to building software and accommodating advanced engineering needs. In the past year alone, Buildkite released one of the most inventive products DevOps has seen in the last decade, Test Analytics, which finally solves one of the biggest, most time-consuming, and most expensive problems in DevOps: flaky tests.
The demand for remote and hybrid work has accelerated the need for software development teams to adopt autonomous tooling to unblock and avoid lapses in productivity. Buildkite democratizes the craft of software development by giving back control to developers. A major player in cultural shifts within billion-dollar organizations, Buildkite transforms legacy static build pipelines into a series of dynamic workflows to create a more efficient build and deploy process. As a result, companies have seen up to an 80% reduction in build times and tens of thousands of developer hours saved.
Keith Pitt, CEO and co-founder of Buildkite, said: “Nine years ago, we developed a product with strong opinions on how CI/CD pipelines should be built. Fast forward to today, it’s used by some of the best software development teams on the planet. The engineer in me is always curious about how our customers build and develop software, and after many chats with them, it’s become clear that many of the other tools they use block them from doing their best work. With this next round of funding, I’m excited to invent new dev tools for the software being developed today, and for the software that hasn’t even been written yet.”
Buildkite’s remote team of 80 has kept pace with widely celebrated companies that boast teams of thousands. The team continues to make waves in the industry, strengthening its affiliation with key partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)–having recently announced Buildkite’s launch on the AWS Marketplace.
Trevor Oelschig, managing director, General Catalyst said: “It is no surprise to see Buildkite’s phenomenal growth and its distinguished list of customers. Keith is a classic product- and customer-centric builder. The team shares his passion for learning and empowering developers who are building enduring companies across multiple industries.”
James Cameron, partner, Airtree said: “Not only has Buildkite been quietly building one of the most impressive set of developer tools in the world, they have also been building one of the most enviable customer bases we’ve ever seen – including many of the world’s most innovative tech companies like Uber, Canva, LinkTree, Shopify, Venmo, Slack, Stripe, Twilio, Segment, Discord, Rabobank, and Twilio.”
“But what stood out even more was how much these customers LOVE their products—I don’t think we’ve ever had as many positive customer testimonials as we had from their devoted fan base. And on top of this, they have been one of the most capital efficient growth stories we’ve ever seen emerge from this part of the world. When we had the opportunity to partner with Keith and the team we jumped at the chance.”
Dr Michelle Deaker, managing director and founding partner, OneVentures has strong ambitions for its latest investment. “OneVentures is delighted to back Buildkite after following its business for a number of years. We were impressed by the strength of the CEO and the company’s ability to generate its quality customer base through a product-led growth approach. The size of the market is substantial and expected to reach $3.9 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 18.5%, with the opportunity to displace legacy solutions and enter some new verticals outside of the tech giants.”
The investment of $15 million in Buildkite is the latest investment from OneVentures’s technology Growth Fund V, following other noteworthy investments in companies such as Employment Hero, Lumary, Flippa and Kepler Analytics.
