Celebrating nine years of CircleCI and our millionth user

Today we are celebrating two big milestones — our nine-year anniversary and adding our one-millionth developer to the platform.

A lot has happened at CircleCI since the company first launched. We’ve run more than 16,795 cumulative years of builds over the nine years we’ve been building, testing, and deploying for our customers.

In nine years, a lot has changed in the SaaS and CI/CD market, too.

“When CircleCI started, CI/CD was a kind of niche, bleeding-edge practice. Now, we’re seeing the market accelerate like never before as companies prioritize automation and continuous delivery systems,” said Jim Rose, CircleCI CEO.

Some of our longest-standing customers, like Spotify, Instacart, and Stitch Fix have also grown tremendously these past nine years alongside us, and we’ve welcomed new top-tier enterprise customers, including NBC Universal, Citigroup, and Unilever. We want to give a big thanks, both to our early adopters and our newest customers, who’ve helped us achieve these milestones.

As more companies have become software-driven and automation has become key to growth, developers have become a core part of how organizations make decisions. “Instead of seeing your development team as this cost center that you’re trying to control, as a security hole that you’re trying to patch, what you’re really thinking about (today) is how to maximize the capabilities and the productivity of all of these very expensive folks that (you) have onboard that are difficult to hire,” said Rose.

As a developer-focused company, we’ve kept the wants and needs of developers as our north star these past nine years. “Developers ultimately are craftspeople at heart,” Rose said. “They love to work with great tools because great tools allow them to build great things.”

At CircleCI, we know how important continuous integration and deployment are. Our recent report showed that our average customer is an elite DevOps performer, showing that CI/CD is a proven path to becoming a high performing engineering team. Because CI/CD is all we focus on, we have a unique opportunity to accelerate our customers’ path to production, helping them increase both product stability and release frequency.

“As long as we focus on the needs of the user, ultimately we’re going to be in good shape,” Rose said. “Users are going to end up choosing the best tool for the particular problem that they’re trying to solve, and we think we do a good job of that.”

In just the past year alone, CircleCI has seen immense growth, including raising our $100 million Series E round, which nearly doubled our total funding to $215.5 million.

Check out some of our other major milestones over the last 12 months:

Corporate momentum:

• A $100 million Series E round in growth funding, nearly doubling total funding to $215.5M.
• Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud-Native Continuous Integration Tools.
• Added 90 new employees to our globally-distributed employee base and opened our first EMEA office in London.
• Welcomed Cack Wilhelm, Partner at IVP, as CircleCI’s first female member of the Board of Directors.
• Championed a new healthcare policy that offers fully-compensated paid leave for employees recovering from transition-related medical procedures.
• Ranked as the number one CI/CD provider for the Ruby on Rails community.
• Featured in multiple “technology companies to watch” lists in leading publications such as Computer World, Business Insider, along with leading channel publication CRN’s list of “Hottest DevOps Startups to watch,” which recognizes technology vendors with a proven ability to innovate with products and services that assist businesses in DevOps automation.

Product innovation:

• Increased orb adoption by 200 percent since we launched these integrations in 2018. Today there are more than 1,900 orbs listed in our registry and more than 58,000 organizations are currently using CircleCI orbs in their CI/CD pipelines.
• Added security certifications with AWS GovCloud, SOC 2 Type II, and FedRamp recertification.
• Launched the general availability of CircleCI’s insights API endpoints, which allow engineering teams to harness crucial information that shows how workflows are performing over time.
• Released the very first Data-Driven Case for CI report that analyzed 30 million workflows to show the adoption of CI/CD as a proven path to engineering team success.

Ecosystem expansion:

• Introduced our developer hub, a dedicated resource library to help engineering teams at companies of all sizes maintain evolving software stacks and optimize CI/CD pipelines.
• Earned multiple designations to ensure best-in-breed compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS) including: APN Advance Partner, AWS DevOps Competency, ATO on AWS Partner, and AWS Marketplace Select Partner.
• Launched new strategic partnerships with technology solutions such as Hashicorp, Plandek, Salesforce, and others.
• Launched Portfolio Partners program for venture capital firms and accelerators to provide CircleCI to their startup ecosystems.

And here are some highlights from the past nine years:

• We’ve run more than 16,795 years of builds, with a recent report showing 80% of workflows finish in under 10 minutes.
• Has seen an 8,000%+ increase in platform usage as measured by total build minutes run on CircleCI.
• Has grown to serve customers in 128 countries.

We are filled with gratitude to our entire developer community for growing with us these past nine years– and we look forward to continuing to support you in bringing your best ideas to life. See all of CircleCI’s growth and momentum over the last nine years on our milestones page.