CloudBees Raises $23.5m - Because Software is Eating the World

Software and IT used to be a tool (out of many others) that helped businesses be more efficient, reduce cost and sometimes improve sales. In the last decade the situation has radically changed. Software is not a tool that "helps" businesses anymore. Software has become *the* business. Everything companies do, from interacting with prospects, customers, partners, handling their production, creating business differentiation is either highly influenced or fully defined by software. And this is not just some kind of particularism that would only apply to "online companies." This is true of pretty much any company. Think about the automotive industry as an example. Here is an industry that's well grounded in heavy industrial concerns: factory plants, raw material, assembly lines, international shipping, mass recalls, etc. Yet, what increasingly differentiates a car in the eyes of buyers is defined by...software! Auto-pilot features and soon-to-come self-driving cars, software is "eating the world."

This transformation is forcing companies to adapt the way they think about IT processes, how business differentiation gets created and pushed to market. Rather than long 18 to 24-month release cycles where risk is high and value creation sparse, companies are moving towards "Continuous Delivery" (aka CD), where business value is continuously pushed to market, in small iterations and measured to see whether it yields expected results. This not only hugely reduces risk (large projects, time to market, etc.) but makes it possible to react to market changes and competitive moves much faster.

Adopting Continuous Delivery involves many changes within an organization. And ultimately, it implies to have a way to automate the process that starts with value creation (i.e. new software) down to its actual release, going through sophisticated automated build, tests, integrations, staging, validations, etc. The more automated a pipeline gets, the more code-release-measure iterations are possible in a give timeframe and the more value can be pushed to market. Automation is king.

CloudBees is offering the #1 solution on the market to implement enterprise Continuous Delivery at scale, based on the open source Jenkins CI project. With the rapid adoption of Continuous Delivery within organisations, CloudBees went through spectacular growth in 2014. This being just the tip of the CD-iceberg, we decided to gives ourselves the means to to achieve our objectives. Consequently, today we are announcing a US $23.5m capital expansion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, including follow-on investment from Matrix Partners, Verizon Ventures and Blue Cloud Ventures.

This investment will make it possible for us to further SCALE-UP and SCALE-OUT .

SCALE-UP as we further invest in our go-to-market to help more and more companies around the globe successfully adopt Continuous Delivery at scale.

SCALE-OUT as we expand the type of use cases and deployment types our solution supports so we can help an even wider range of companies to benefit from Continuous Delivery.

We will be making a lot of announcements in the next weeks and months, so stay tuned.

Onward.

Sacha Labourey
CTO and Founder
CloudBees