Enterprise software delivery platform CloudBees raises $150M

Enterprise-focused software delivery platform CloudBees has raised $150 million in a series F round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion.

Founded in 2010, CloudBees initially built an enterprise product on top of the open source automation server project Jenkins. Today, the San Jose, California-based company works with big-name businesses such as Bosch, Airbnb, Salesforce, HSBC, and Allianz, serving an end-to-end software delivery toolset spanning continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), feature management, analytics, and more. It’s all about automating software deployments, monitoring quality, and ensuring any updates can be easily tested and rolled back where flaws are found.

Right tools for the job

Every company these days is effectively a software company, by many estimations at least, meaning that every company needs the tools to ensure their software is bug-free and functional.

“The digital transformation story that started before the pandemic, and has only accelerated over the past 18 months, has made software the foundation for the world’s enterprises,” CloudBees CEO Stephen Dewitt told VentureBeat.

But with the pressures of frequently shipping new code, rather than rolling out large updates less often, this increases the chances that bad code will find its way into the wild. These problems are perhaps likely to be more emphasized at larger companies — companies that may have dozens of different applications and millions of users globally. And this is where CloudBees has set out to help.

“Enterprises are by their very definition complex — most enterprise companies have years of existing investments in tools, processes, applications, and infrastructure,” Dewitt said. “They need to orchestrate billions of lines of code across complex multi-cloud environments, and they need to do so in a compliant, secure way. We help customers do this on all levels.”

Continuous compliance

While it would be wrong to say that smaller companies don’t have to worry about things like compliance, larger companies — such as financial institutions — that manage the private data of millions of customers have to ensure that they meet whatever the local privacy regulations are for their locale. This can be a hugely time-consuming endeavor, which is why CloudBees recently launched a dedicated compliance product that automates many of the compliance processes. This includes a rules-builder, which sets compliance standards across an organization spanning source code and binary repositories, databases, on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and more — without having to train developers in compliance standards.

“We help developers focus their brilliance on the code they create, versus the hassle of compliance,” Dewitt explained. “Consider, for example, a bank that does business in 140 countries. The compliance considerations that are required at this scale are staggering. So how do you automate that? How do you drive that capability while focusing on developer productivity? We are obsessed with answering those questions day in and day out.”

Above: CloudBees’ rule designer

Prior to now, CloudBees had raised around $111 million. With another $245 million in the bank — in addition to a separate $95 million debt facility it announced today — the company is well-financed to build out its platform, recruit new talent, and grow its footprint internationally in markets such as Asia Pacific (APAC). The company’s series F round was led by “client vehicles” advised by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with participation from Morgan Stanley, Bridgepoint Capital, HSBC, Golub Capital, and Delta-v Capital.

CloudBees’ latest cash injection also comes in the same year as other notable players in the space, including Harness and CircleCI which have raised gargantuan sums of money at billion-dollar valuations. So it’s safe to say that the software delivery space is hot, and it’s likely only going to get hotter.

“The innovations of today — and tomorrow — are software based,” Dewitt said. “Software drives every component of our lives — it’s how we manage our finances, how we vote, how our kids are learning, how we order food, how we even see a doctor … the list is endless. So if this is true — and we know it is — then the demand for software delivery is baked into this new reality.”