CircleCI

CircleCI sells continuous integration and continuous delivery software: hosted and self-hosted pipelines that build, test and deploy code each time engineers push a change. Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner founded the company in San Francisco in 2011, and it remains headquartered there with a distributed workforce. Jim Rose is chief executive. TechCrunch reported in January 2023 that more than one million software engineers used the platform, and the company names Adobe, Okta and Hugging Face among its customers.

The company raised capital in a steady sequence of venture rounds. After an initial check of about $50,000 in 2011 and a $1.5 million seed round in 2013, CircleCI raised a $6 million Series A from DFJ in 2014 and an $18 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners in 2016. Top Tier Capital Partners led a $31 million Series C in 2018, and Owl Rock Capital and NextEquity Partners led a $56 million Series D in 2019. IVP led a $100 million Series E in 2020, and Greenspring Associates led a $100 million Series F in 2021 that valued the company at $1.7 billion. Total funding through 2021 was about $315 million.

CircleCI is still private and has not announced an IPO or a sale. It has made small acquisitions of its own: Distiller (2014), Vamp (2021) and Ponicode (2022). In December 2022 it laid off about 17% of its staff, roughly 100 people. In January 2023 it disclosed a breach in which malware on an engineer's laptop was used to steal a valid single sign-on session and take customer environment variables, tokens and keys. The company told every customer to rotate all secrets stored on the platform.

For investors, CircleCI shows how long developer infrastructure can take to reach liquidity. Early backers DFJ and Scale Venture Partners have held their positions for more than a decade. Later money came largely from growth and fund-of-funds investors such as IVP, Greenspring Associates and Top Tier Capital Partners, along with a credit-oriented lender, Owl Rock. The 2021 valuation was set at the peak of the venture market, and no later priced round has been made public. The 2023 breach is also a reminder that a CI/CD vendor holding customer credentials carries security risk that diligence on the company has to address.