We raised a $56M Series D: What’s next for CircleCI customers

Today we announced our $56M Series D led by Owl Rock Capital and NextEquity Partners, along with our existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), Baseline Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Heavybit. This brings our total raised to date to $115.5M. Thank you to our customers, our team, and our partners for your support of our vision of shortening the distance between idea and delivery.

Since we announced our Series C in January 2018, we have seen a tremendous amount of growth:

• Our customer roster has grown and expanded, and now includes world-class engineering organizations like Samsung, the U.S. Small Business Administration, Ford Motor Company, HashiCorp, Chewy, PagerDuty, the National Bank of Canada, Deloitte Japan, BuzzFeed, VMWare, Twitch, and many, many more.

• We opened our first international office in Tokyo, along with hubs in Boston and Denver.

• Our team has grown from 120 employees to 250, and we expect to add 50+ more this year.

• We added five new people to our executive team: June Ko, General Counsel; Thomas Enochs, VP of Customer Engineering; Michael Stahnke, VP of Platform Engineering; Tom Trahan, Head of Business Development; and Kensuke Morimoto, Japan Country Manager.

• We launched orbs for templating configuration, retired CircleCI 1.0, became the first (and only) FedRAMP-certified CI/CD tool, introduced pipelines, and released restricted contexts for increased pipeline security.

• Our monthly job count has grown from 7M+ in January 2018 to now over 30M.

The developer tools space is growing incredibly quickly, and there is a huge opportunity for companies that can meet the needs of both developers and large companies. We plan to do just that.

Here’s how, and what you can expect from us next:

Continue our laser-focus on CI/CD

The best teams focus on their unique value proposition and let others complete work outside of that domain. We are big believers in outsourcing undifferentiated heavy lifting: we focus on CI/CD, so our customers can build their next big thing.

You should expect to see our team double-down on the core problem of continuous integration and continuous delivery. A team’s CI/CD pipeline is both the heart and the control center of their software delivery. This is too important of a problem to tackle in part. We’re focused on being the best platform on the market, so our customers can move as quickly and as confidently as possible.

While focus is a key ingredient for success, there’s a trend in our space to try and attack every angle and possible need of an engineering team’s process, from work planning to monitoring. While all of those fields are critical, we do not see a world in which one tool can anticipate, build, and satisfy the needs of sophisticated engineering teams. While having one tool to run your whole software development process may sound nice in theory, we know that going all-in with one company is a risky bet that, more often than not, ends in customer pain.

Invest heavily in agnosticism and extensibility

While CI/CD is our core competency, we know that we can’t imagine every possible delivery model that teams might want. We took our first steps to become a platform when we launched orbs, the package manager for configuration in 2018. Less than a year later, we have over 900 orbs on our registry from 45+ industry partners. We will continue to focus on orbs as our means for platform extensibility, so you can connect all of your favorite tools to your CI/CD pipeline. We will also continue to invest in our CLI and API. If you want to see where that work is heading, you can preview our v2 API now.

Next, we plan to increase our VCS and execution environment agnosticism. We are already running Windows jobs for customers, in addition to Linux, Docker, and macOS. We plan to continue opening up our support for different Git providers, including GitLab.

Harness our scale to surface data and insights on value delivery

With over 30M independent jobs run every month and growing, CircleCI has a rich and unparalleled understanding of languages, architectural patterns, code testing patterns, delivery success rates, team practices, and more. We are actively investing in making those insights available to you, our developer customers, to help improve the health of value delivery for all.

Today, it’s very hard to answer the question, “is my engineering team high performing?” We believe that surfacing metrics like velocity and time to recovery can help teams find and fix problems quickly, and ultimately, deliver tremendous value to their customers.

Continue our strategy of developer empowerment, with enterprise control

Our success to date has been based on focusing relentlessly on delivering the power and flexibility that developers need, while making sure that we also have the controls and checks that businesses require. While some see these two priorities as necessitating tradeoffs, we know that teams deserve and require both.

We are currently taking steps to make our work more intuitive, through a new UI currently in the works, as well as improvements to our onboarding process. And while we are committed to supporting free usage for public and private projects, we will also continue to extend the range of compute options available. We are previewing a new usage-based pricing model that gives teams per-job control over their resource classes. We believe humans should never be waiting on machines, and we want to give teams flexibility and control to power their workflows in the ways that best meet their needs.

Finally, we will continue to build our global account and support teams, expanding our presence in APAC and EMEA. We know that CI/CD is mission-critical, and our customers expect and rely on the expertise of our team of professional support and success engineers, customer success managers, and account executives.

Thank you again to our team, partners, and most importantly, our customers. Supporting the world’s best engineering teams, at scale, is an incredibly rewarding adventure, and we learn from and are inspired by what you are building every day.

We’re proud of what we have accomplished to date, but there is still more work to be done. If you want to help shape the future of software delivery, come and join the team: we’re hiring.