CloudBees looks a little different every time it raises money. Which is a good thing, since it’s a startup playing in a field with some big competitors.
The company has raised $23.5 million in a growth-equity round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a previous investor. Matrix Partners, Verizon Ventures, and Blue Cloud Ventures also participated in the round, which roughly doubles CloudBees’ total funding to just under $50 million. The startup recently moved its headquarters from Woburn, MA, to Los Altos, CA, though it still has workers in the Boston area.
CloudBees first got on my radar for building a cloud-computing “platform as a service” where software developers could build, test, and deploy their code. The startup’s strategy challenged entrenched powers like Oracle, IBM, and VMware in software for developing cloud applications.
But last March, CloudBees founder and CEO Sacha Labourey said the company was shifting away from providing platform tools for developers and focusing more on the “continuous delivery” market, whereby developers can make their code ready to deploy at all times instead of working in fixed release cycles.
Now CloudBees has gone further in that direction, shutting down its platform as a service at the end of 2014 and focusing on supporting an open-source tool called Jenkins, which helps developers test and integrate code with a working system while it’s running.
Though CloudBees got started in 2010, it’s still early in the startup’s journey. By getting out of the crowded platform-as-a-service market and moving into continuous delivery—which seems to be gaining adoption among businesses—the company has bought itself more time to grow.
