[Updated 2/7/18, 4:04 pm. See below.] CloudBees is snapping up Codeship in a union of two software development toolmakers founded in the early 2010s.
Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed in a press release. San Jose, CA-based CloudBees, which used to be headquartered in the Boston area, is bringing on Codeship’s team of around 30 employees.
Codeship was formed in 2011 in Vienna, Austria, by Moritz Plassnig, Florian Motlik, and Manuel Weiss. It participated in the Techstars Boston startup accelerator program in 2013, and later moved its headquarters here. The firm still has a Vienna office, plus one in Berlin, Germany.
Codeship developed a Web-based service enabling automated testing and implementing of software code. It has more than 2,400 customers, according to the press release. Codeship has raised more than $11 million in venture capital from Ascent Venture Partners, Sigma Prime Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, F-Prime Capital Partners, and others.
Meanwhile, CloudBees has hauled in around $52 million in venture capital, according to a company statement e-mailed to Xconomy. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and Verizon Ventures are among its investors. [VC total updated.—Eds.]
CloudBees said the acquisition of Codeship gives it a “broader portfolio” of software development products for companies and organizations of all sizes. Its tools enable “continuous integration” and “continuous delivery” of software. Continuous integration means that while developers are refining interim versions of code, team members send the versions they have to a shared repository for testing. Continuous delivery means developers can make their code ready to deploy at all times instead of working in fixed release cycles.
CloudBees has gone through several twists and turns since it got started eight years ago by Sacha Labourey, the former chief technology officer of JBoss. CloudBees initially operated a cloud-computing “platform as a service” where software developers could build, test, and deploy their code. That put it up against entrenched powers like Oracle, IBM, and VMware in software for developing cloud applications.
It later shifted away from providing platform tools for developers and instead worked primarily on continuous integration and delivery. It shut down its platform as a service at the end of 2014 and focused on supporting an open-source tool called Jenkins, which helps developers test and integrate code with a working system while it’s running. (Also around that time, CloudBees moved its headquarters from Woburn, MA, to the Bay Area.)
CloudBees and Codeship are betting that an alliance will give the combined companies a leg up in a competitive sector whose players include tech giants like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as newer firms such as GitHub and CircleCI.
“We recognize that needs are evolving quickly” in the market for continuous delivery tools and other “DevOps” products, Labourey said in a prepared statement. “With Codeship, we want to provide organizations an additional option that is self-service and easy to use.”
