Emerging DevOps Darling CircleCI Closes $56 Million Round

The startup's CTO says the money will go into extending the business into global markets and enhancing a CI/CD product used by one-third of the Forbes Cloud 100

CircleCI, an emerging DevOps presence in enterprise development shops, has closed a $56 million D Round that will help the startup scale into global markets and upgrade its product portfolio.

New investors Owl Rock Capital Partners and Next Equity led the round, with several existing investors also participating, the San Francisco-based company said Tuesday.

CircleCI delivers CI/CD technology mostly in a Software-as-a-Service format, allowing developers to focus on building their core products and not managing their DevOps tooling, the company's CTO, Rob Zuber, told CRN.

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The company was founded in 2011, and by the end of 2014 acquired Distiller, a startup building continuous integration and delivery technology for mobile applications.

Zuber and the other founders of Distiller walked across a street in San Francisco to meet with CircleCI leadership, and soon after decided to join forces, realizing the emerging DevOps market would come to demand a comprehensive solution.

CircleCI now has 250 employees. It recently opened offices in Japan, where the product caught traction even before the company had a presence.

With the latest funding, CircleCI looks to grow its presence in Japan and extend into Europe and then the wider EMEA market, Zuber said.

CircleCI has seen its customers change dramatically since its early days, he told CRN.

The tool was originally adopted by startups, often in the Ruby on Rails community.

"Now we're talking to and supporting some pretty large organizations. A third of the Forbes Cloud 100. Big companies running complex engineering organizations," Zuber said.

"We've grown with them to support the way they're doing their work."

Last year the company introduced configuration packages called "orbs"—bundles of jobs, commands and executors that developers could import into build configurations.

The startup will invest in that product as well as its APIs to make the platform more extensible. It will also use the latest funding to become more agnostic to build environments.

CircleCI raised $59 million across its previous funding rounds for a total investment of $115.5 million.