The CEO of DevOps startup CircleCI, which just raised $100 million, says that every week during the coronavirus crisis has been its new 'largest week ever'

CircleCI

The CircleCI executive team includes from left to right, CEO Jim Rose, CTO Rob Zuber, CFO Chitra Balasubramanian, CRO Jane Kim, and CMO Erich Ziegler

• On Tuesday, DevOps startup CircleCI announced $100 million in new Series E funding.
• CircleCI CEO Jim Rose says that every week since the start of the coronavirus crisis has been the "largest week ever" for the company in terms of the number of projects actively built on the platform.
• Rose says it's likely because more developer teams now have to work remotely, so they're relying on CircleCI to collaborate, build, and release code to their customers.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As the coronavirus pandemic causes widespread economic uncertainty, DevOps startup CircleCI is seeing the opposite effect.

The startup announced $100 million in Series E funding on Tuesday, with IVP and Sapphire Ventures leading the round, and CEO Jim Rose said that every week since mid-March has been the company's single largest week in its history.

Nine-year-old CircleCI creates continuous integration and delivery software, or software that helps developers automatically test and release code faster and more often - making it possible to push new features or updates to the public multiple times a day.

The new funding round, which closed before shelter-in-place orders became widespread throughout the US, will help CircleCI double-down on research and development, as well as its plan to expand to other countries.

"Every week is our largest week ever, which is a little hard for us to get our brains around because there's so much pressure in the market right now," Rose told Business Insider. "It's a crazy time out there. We want to make sure we do everything we can and help everyone across the platform as much as we can."

Against expectations, a surge in demand

CircleCI originally suspected that as its customers faced more economic pressure, they would start delivering less code, which would negatively impact the startup, Rose said.

It was wrong. CircleCI has actually seen a "pretty big uptick" in demand, Rose said, to the point where every week recently has been its new highest week ever in terms of the number of projects that are actively built on the platform.

"It puts us in a position where we are tripling down on making sure the infrastructure can scale and handle loads we hadn't originally expected to see," Rose said. "We're basically part of a mission critical infrastructure where we have to continue to invest more and more."

Rose believes that the increased demand is tied to the increase in remote work. Since members of software teams are now working separately from their respective homes, there's more activity on CircleCI as they collaborate on writing and releasing software over the platform, he said. As a result, CircleCI needs to make sure its platform stays up and running to help its customers.

"We're spending our dollars to make sure our platform is as rock solid as possible," he said.

Still, because of the economic downturn, Rose says CircleCI is trying to be "smart" and take a "more measured approach" to its spending than it may have otherwise.

"We're being as thoughtful as we can," Rose said. "I don't think anyone has a crystal ball to predict how long this goes."

Making sure CircleCI works for startups, as well as big companies: 'The next Facebook might be in there'

CircleCI says that it's customer base has been evolving. While it was initially signing on tech startups primarily, in the past year and a half it's seeing more traditional large businesses coming around to continuous delivery,

"Not only are technically sophisticated startups really embracing continuous delivery, now enterprises are also adopting this approach and looking for ways to become more agile and nimble," Rose said. "There are more traditional enterprises who are really leapfrogging and taking on very advanced software delivery practices."

Going forward, CircleCI plans to invest in how it uses and processes customer data.

Pooling together data about existing open source code and services could help developers with starting a new project so that they don't need to start completely from scratch, Rose said. Or, if there's a common issue that occurs, CircleCI would be able to point developers in the right direction.

"Out of 100 or 1,000 projects, who knows, the next Facebook might be in there," Rose said. "We want to do everything possible to help people."

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