Software development company Buildkite has announced the completion of a $32 million (US$21 million) Series B funding round.
Though officially based in Melbourne, much of the team, including CEO and co-founder Keith Pitt, are based here in Perth.
Co-led by OneVentures and Air Tree, alongside US-based General Catalyst and Dom Pym, the founder of digital bank Up, Buildkite will dedicate 100% of the funds to launch its new developer-focused products, and expand its existing operations, marketing and sales team.
Over the past nine years, the Buildkite platform has become popular for the way users can build, test and deploy software at scale.
It was the first to introduce the hybrid CI/CD model which allows customers to 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 with the ability to achieve closer performance parity by utilising their own resources while keeping their source code within their walls.
Meanwhile, the development teams have benefitted from increased usability compared to a fully self-hosted CI/CD alternative.
A-list users
To date, Buildkite has raised a total of $57.9 million (USD$39 million) and partnered with several Fortune 1000 companies such as Wayfair, Shopify, Slack, Twilo, Canva and Lyft.
During the past year Buildkite has released one of the most inventive products DevOps has seen over the past decade, Test Analytics, which solves one of the biggest, most time-consuming and expensive problems in DevOps: flaky tests.
The increase in hybrid and remote work has accelerated the need for software development teams to help adopt autonomous tooling that can unblock and avoid lapses in productivity.
“Nine years ago, we developed a product with strong opinions on how CI/CD pipelines should be built,” said Mr Pitt.
“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.
Keith Pitt, Co-founder and CEO
“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.”
Currently, Buildkite has a remote team of 80, and has strengthened its affiliation with key partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Trevor Oelschig, managing director, General Catalyst added, “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.”
Airtree partner James Cameron said that not only has Buildkite been quietly building one of the most impressive set of developers tools globally, the team has also been building an enviable customer base.
“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,” he said.
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.
James Cameron, Airtree
OneVentures managing director and founding partner Michelle Deaker, said OneVentures has strong ambitions for its latest investment.
“OneVentures is delighted to back Buildkite after following its business for a number of years,” said Dr Deaker.
“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.”
