CircleCI

CircleCI was founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner. Biggar, a Dubliner, holds a PhD in computer science from Trinity College Dublin and is a Y Combinator alumnus.⁠[1][2][3]

Biggar’s earlier ventures, including Newslabs.com and Newstilt.com, aimed to help newspapers adapt to the internet but did not gain traction; he then worked for Mozilla, first in Dublin and later in San Francisco, where he saw the gap that CircleCI would later address.⁠[2]

On February 25, 2013, CircleCI announced $1.5 million in seed funding from investors including Heroku founders James Lindenbaum and Adam Wiggins, The Lean Startup author Eric Ries, Baseline, Harrison Metal, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, 500 Startups, Hiten Shah of Kissmetrics and Slicehost founder Jason Seats.⁠[3]

CircleCI then described itself as “Heroku for testing,” offering continuous integration and deployment to development teams and splitting tests across up to 16 machines.⁠[3]

In February 2014 CircleCI raised $6 million from venture firm DFJ, in an investment led by former Facebook executive Bubba Murarka, who joined CircleCI’s board. The company then had revenue of $1 million a year and 1,000 web developer customers; Biggar said it had done no marketing or sales and relied on word of mouth.⁠[2]

In April 2020 CircleCI closed a $100 million Series E led by IVPIVPIVP (Institutional Venture Partners) is a growth-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded by Reid W. Dennis in 1980; it has invested in companies including Twitter, Dropbox, Coinbase and Figma.Open the full entry with participation from Sapphire Ventures, bringing its total funding since its 2011 founding to $215 million. Jim Rose was CEO, and the platform was processing more than 1.8 million jobs per day.⁠[4]

In May 2021 CircleCI announced a $100 million Series F at a $1.7 billion valuation, led by Greenspring Associates with participation from Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold, Scale, Owl Rock and Next Equity Partners; the company said its total funding exceeded $315 million.⁠[5][6]

At the same time CircleCI acquired Vamp, a release orchestration platform founded in Amsterdam in 2013, bringing on its 15-person team; the price was not disclosed. CircleCI then had more than 550 employees, double the year before, and Freshworks CMO Stacey Epstein became its first independent board member.⁠[5][6]

In March 2022 CircleCI acquired Ponicode, a Paris-based startup founded in 2019 that had raised $4.6 million and worked on machine learning tools for software testing; terms were not disclosed.⁠[7]

In an incident report published on January 12, 2023, CTO Rob Zuber said malware undetected by antivirus software had compromised an engineer’s laptop on December 16, 2022; the attacker stole “a valid, 2FA-backed SSO session,” reached a subset of production systems and on December 22 exfiltrated customer environment variables, tokens and keys.⁠[8]

On January 4, 2023, CircleCI shut down the employee’s access and notified customers, advising them to rotate all secrets stored in CircleCI; it then revoked project and personal API tokens and rotated tokens with GitHub, Atlassian and others. As of January 12, fewer than five customers had informed CircleCI of unauthorized access to third-party systems as a result.⁠[8]

CircleCI’s website lists its leadership as CEO Jim Rose, president and CFO Chitra Balasubramanian, CTO Rob Zuber and chief revenue officer Judson Griffin, and describes a globally distributed workforce.⁠[1]

CircleCI: Official website: https://circleci.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/circleci (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/circleci (opens in a new window).⁠[1]