CircleCI, which offers tools for companies seeking to speed up the process of developing their own software, announced today that it has raised $31 million in a Series C fundraising round.
The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2011, offers one of the software development platforms that provide frequent, automated tests of the interim versions of code produced by various members of a company team working together on a product or update. Even while they’re still working to refine the different elements of the software design, team members send the versions they have to a shared repository for testing. The CI in CircleCI’s name stands for this kind of development process, called continuous integration.
The method can catch bugs at an earlier stage of product development by testing the elements of an application as they’re produced, rather than waiting until a later stage to combine all the elements and test them together.
Other companies supporting continuous integration in software development are San Francisco-based Atlassian (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TEAM]]), with its tool Bamboo; Boston-based Codeship; and Santa Clara, CA-based BlazeMeter.
Another is San Francisco-based GitHub, whose unit GitHub Enterprise helps companies build and test their new software while keeping the project entirely on their own computers and servers, rather than making use of cloud infrastructures.
CircleCI allows customers to choose whether to keep the process on proprietary machines, or to operate a collaborative app-building process in a Web-based environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“Our philosophy is to provide full API endpoints to every part of the CI system such that customers can use any tools they desire,” CircleCI CEO Jim Rose wrote in an e-mail to Xconomy. “We also integrate with GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Jira, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku, etc.”
The company counts Facebook, Lyft, Coinbase, Zenefits, Heroku, and Spotify among the users of its developer tools. Rose declined to disclose revenue numbers.
CircleCI’s Series C round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners, with participation by other new investors Industry Ventures and Heavybit, who were also joined by previous investors Scale Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and DFJ. The $31 million in new capital brings CircleCI’s fundraising total to $59 million.
In an announcement about the fundraising round on Wednesday, Rose said the company’s new money will be invested in “prediction and intelligent automation,” to enhance the speed and delivery of new software or app modifications.
