Category: UNCATEGORIZED

A little over a year into launching StrongLoop, an enterprise API startup eventually acquired by IBM, we were out over our skis. It was my doing — having built a vast top of funnel, we expected our product to have a specific sell-through rate and I’d optimistically hired in engineering, customer support, marketing and sales. However, the sales cycles were long, burn rate was too high and we had too many highly skilled people who were a little bored. It was time to orchestrate a reduction in force.

I’d been laid off a few times myself, once from a pivoting startup and again during the downturn of 2001, so I knew what it felt like. I’d also been a manager at a larger company that laid off employees, so I’d seen the corporate playbook. But as the CEO, I had personally sold these people on our vision, cramming into a small substandard office with them for months or years — it felt very personal. Back then, the job market was robust: I didn’t worry about team members finding new jobs. Today is more uncertain.

With many startups under the pressure of a pandemic-fueled economic crisis, I interviewed several CEOs who have had to orchestrate COVID-19-related layoffs to capture (what I believe) are some best practices to downsize correctly and compassionately.

Put people before projects

One company had a pending product launch, yet a few renewals were pushed due to COVID-19-based uncertainty. Meanwhile, the board had decided to extend runway to have more options. The question was: Should the company complete the product launch and let employees know they’re losing their jobs after? Or should they tell employees ahead of time, risking a loss in focus while some members of the team (correctly) start looking for jobs?

InVision, the design firm that’s raised more than $350 million from investors FirstMark, Spark, Battery, and Tiger Global Management, has today announced the appointment of Eleanor Morgan as Chief Product Officer. The company is also introducing a brand new Design System Manager, giving teams much more flexibility and control in both creating and maintaining their design system.

New features include the ability to import reusable design elements in bulk, as well as the ability to upload native Sketch libraries directly to the InVision DSM, allowing design system owners to create and manage their libraries in Sketch and seamlessly move it into InVision. The new DSM also allows for one-click updating of all libraries when a company is going through a rebrand, allowing for the entire design system to get updated at once rather than a process where each individual design asset has to be deleted and replaced with a new one.

InVision is also launching a new, more flexible documentation site for richer web editing and brand customization, with the purpose of ensuring there is a single, trusted system of record across the entire organization.

The Design System Manager flies a bit under the radar among InVision’s portfolio of products, which includes its Cloud tools (such as Prototype, Inspect, and Freehand) and Studio (its design tool). But the Design System Manager is critical for InVision’s broader goal of enabling collaborative design across any type of company, from early stage startups to Fortune 500 firms.

As the design industry itself matures, with more and more companies focusing on digital experiences and more functions within the organization involving themselves in the design process, a solid experience around design systems is the unsexy backbone of the entire workflow.

“At the most essential level, it’s an accelerator of digital product development,” said Morgan. “I think the second thing is, it helps ensure quality and consistency in a customer experience by creating a shared set of components that teams can leverage at scale. Those two things are fundamental to our platform going forward.”

Prior to joining InVision, Morgan was a product designer at Volkswagen, a project lead and location director for IDEO, and most recently the Chief Experience Officer at Casper.

Morgan says that the biggest challenge for InVision is not just capitalizing on the immense shift toward digital experiences that was already underway before the pandemic, and now ballooning further because of it, but to think two or three years ahead of this moment about where collaborative design and product development will be.

InVision faces steep competition in a growing category, with Canva serving the non-design designers, Figma looking to move further into the consumer space, Sketch raising a fresh $20 million, and Adobe moving hard into collaborative editing.

Whether the design space is gearing up for a ‘winner takes all scenario’ or there’s room for several behemoths at the top is still yet to be determined. But design may very well be the next entrepreneurial gold rush, and InVision, with a valuation of $1.9 billion and 7 million users on the platform, is here for the showdown.

SpaceX has raised $1.9 billion in new funding, per a filing with the SEC from Tuesday which was first spotted by Reuters. The company had been reported to be in the funding process earlier by Bloomberg, which pegged the post-money valuation of SpaceX at $46 billion following this raise.

The new funding for the still private SpaceX hardly comes as a surprise; The Elon Musk -led private launch company has been seeking funding since earlier this year, but Bloomberg reported last week that it increased the size of investment it was seeking owing to strong demand from the investment community.

The round was reportedly oversubscribed, though there isn’t yet much information available about who participated in the round (Bloomberg’s report said Fidelity Investments was among the largest in, but they did not confirm). SpaceX might be better positioned than ever to seek significant resources from investors, given the string of high-profile successes it has recorded recently.

Those include completing the first ever private human spaceflight mission to take off from U.S. soil. That mission, Demo-2, took off from Florida in May and returned the astronauts it carried to Earth earlier this month after a two-month stint at the International Space Station. Its successful completion means SpaceX can now regularly supply transportation services to and from the ISS – and puts them closer than ever to offering commercial spaceflight services for private tourists, researchers and more.

SpaceX has also made good progress on its Starlink spacecraft development program, with a successful short test flight of the prototype this month, and it won multiple multi-year contracts from NASA and the U.S. government for launch services this year.

It’s currently in the process of a very capital-intensive endeavor, too, which could explain the size of the round: Deploying Starlink, the massive satellite constellation that it will own and operate, and that will provide commercial and residential broadband internet services to customers in hard to reach areas once it’s active. Just this morning, SpaceX launched 58 more Starlink satellites, but it will have to launch many more before it can achieve its goal of global coverage.

TC Sessions: Mobility is back and we’re excited to give the first peek of what and who is coming to the main stage. We’re not revealing everything just yet, but already this agenda highlights some of the best and brightest minds in autonomous vehicles, electrification and shared mobility.

Before we get into who is coming, let’s tackle one important change from our 2019 inaugural event: TC Sessions: Mobility will be virtual. Never fear, the virtual version of TC Sessions: Mobility will bring all of what you’d expect from our in-person events, from the informative panels and provocative one-on-one interviews to the networking and even a pitch-off session.

While virtual isn’t the same as our events in the past, it has provided one massive benefit: democratizing access. If you’re a startup or investor based in Europe, Africa, Australia, South America or another region in the U.S., you can listen in, network and connect with other participants here in Silicon Valley. Plus, you’ll be able to meet all of the attendees through our matchmaking platform, CrunchMatch.

This year, we’re also holding a pitch-off competition for early-stage mobility companies. More details will be shared in the coming weeks about how to apply to participate in the pitch-off competition.

TechCrunch reporters and editors will interview some of the top leaders in transportation to tackle topics such as scaling up an electric vehicle company, the future of automated vehicle technology, micro mobility, building an AV startup and investing in the industry. Our guests include Argo AI co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky, Waymo COO Tekedra Mawakana, Lucid Motors CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson, Ike Robotics co-founder and chief engineer Nancy Sun, Formula E race car driver Lucas di Grassi, Cruise’s director of public affairs Prashanthi Raman, Lyft’s head of bikes and scooters Dor Levi, Hemi Ventures managing partner Amy Gu as well as TuSimple co-founder and CTO Xiaodi Hou and Boris Sofman, former Anki Robotics founder and CEO who now leads Waymo’s trucking unit. And there’s more

Don’t forget that early-bird tickets (including $100 savings) are currently available for a limited time; grab your tickets here before prices increase.

Some speakers have already been announced, and more will be added to the agenda in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime, check out this early look at the agenda:

AGENDA

Tuesday, October 6

Waymo Grows Up with Tekedra Mawakana (Waymo)

Waymo Chief Operating Officer Tekedra Mawakana is at the center of Waymo’s future, from scaling the autonomous vehicle company’s commercial deployment and directing fleet operations to developing the company’s business path. Tekedra will speak about what lies ahead as Waymo drives forward with its plan to become a grownup business.

Investing in Mobility with Reilly Brennan (Trucks VC), Amy Gu (Hemi Ventures), and Olaf Sakkers (Maniv Mobility)

Reilly Brennan, Amy Gu and Olaf Sakkers will come together to debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

Networking Break

With our virtual platform, attendees can network via video chat with other attendees, giving folks the chance to make meaningful connections. CrunchMatch, our algorithmic matching product, will be available to ensure you’re meeting the right people at the show, as well as random matching for folks who are feeling more adventurous.

Setting the Record Straight with Bryan Salesky (Argo AI)

Argo AI has gone from unknown startup to a company providing the autonomous vehicle technology to Ford and VW — not to mention billions in investment from the two global automakers. Co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky will talk about the company’s journey, what’s next and what it really takes to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology.

The Next Opportunities in Micromobility with Danielle Harris (Elemental Excelerator), Dor Levi (Lyft) and Dmitry Shevelenko (Tortoise)

Worldwide, numerous companies are operating shared micromobility services — so many that the industry is well into a consolidation phase. Despite the over-saturation of the market, there are still opportunities for new players. Dor Levi, head of bikes and scooters at Lyft, Danielle Harris, director of mobility innovation at Elemental Excelerator and Dmitry Shevelenko, founder at Tortoise will discuss.

Building an AV Startup with Nancy Sun (Ike)

Ike co-founder and chief engineer Nancy Sun will share her experiences in the world of automation and robotics, a ride that has taken her from Apple to Otto and Uber before she set off to start a self-driving truck company. Sun will discuss what the future holds for trucking and the challenges and the secrets behind building a successful mobility startup.

Uber’s City Footprint with Shin-pei Tsay (Uber)

Uber’s operations touch upon many aspects of the transportation ecosystem. Whether its autonomous vehicles, food delivery, trucking or traditional ride-hailing, these products and services all require Uber to interact with cities and ensure the company is on the good side of cities. That’s where Shin-pei Tsay comes in. Hear from Tsay about how she thinks through Uber’s place in cities and how she navigates various regulatory frameworks.

The road to the all-electric Air with Peter Rawlinson (Lucid Motors)

Just weeks after Lucid Motors unveils its long-anticipated all-electric luxury Air sedan, we’ll sit down with Peter Rawlinson to discuss the challenges of building an car company and assembling that first production vehicle as well as plans for the future.

Wednesday, October 7

The future of racing with Lucas di Grassi

Formula E driver Lucas Di Grassi is part of a new racing series, in which riders on high-speed electric scooters compete against each other on temporary circuits in cities. Think Formula E, but with electric scooters. The former CEO of Roborace and sustainability ambassador of the EsC, of Electric Scooter Championship, will join us to talk about electrification, micro mobility and a new kind of motorsport.

The Electrification of Porsche with Klaus Zellmer (Porsche)

Porsche has undergone a major transformation in the past several years, investing billions into an electric vehicle program and launching the Taycan, its first all-electric vehicle. Now, Porsche is ramping up for more. North America CEO Klaus Zellmer will talk about Porsche’s path, competition and where it’s headed next.

The Future of Trucking with Xiaodi Hou (TuSimple) and Boris Sofman (Waymo)

TuSimple co-founder and CTO Xiaodi Hou and Boris Sofman, former Anki Robotics founder and CEO who now leads Waymo’s trucking unit, will discuss the business and the technical challenges of autonomous trucking.

Networking Break

With our virtual platform, attendees can network via video chat with other attendees, giving folks the chance to make meaningful connections. CrunchMatch, our algorithmic matching product, will be available to ensure you’re meeting the right people at the show, as well as random matching for folks who want to broaden their search.

Navigating Self-Driving Car Regulations with David Estrada (Nuro), Melissa Froelich (Aurora) and Jody Kelman (Lyft), Prashanthi Raman (Cruise)

Autonomous vehicle developers face a patchwork of local, state and federal regulations. Government policy experts, from Nuro, Aurora, Lyft and Cruise, discuss how to get your startup back on the road safely.

Startup Pitch-Off

Select, early-stage companies, hand-picked by TechCrunch editors, will take the stage and have five minutes to present their companies.

Walmart’s investments in e-commerce, including online grocery delivery and pickup, are continuing to pay off for the retailer. In the company’s Q2 earnings, released this morning, Walmart reported its U.S. e-commerce sales were up 97% — an increase attributed to more customers shopping online during the pandemic, stocking up on household supplies, and shopping for grocery items online.

Today, Walmart offers grocery pickup at 3,450 locations and same-day delivery at 2,730 stores. Since February, it has expanded time slots by 30% to help meet consumer demand.

Overall, the company also benefited in the quarter from the impact of U.S. consumers’ government stimulus checks. As those stimulus funds ran out, sales began to normalize. But Walmart’s July comparable sales still grew by more than 4%, the company noted.

Walmart’s online marketplace also got a boost from the larger e-commerce bump, with sales up by a triple-digit percentage.

In addition, Walmart’s U.S. same-store sales were up 9.3% in the retailer’s fiscal second quarter, led by strength in general merchandise and food. Walmart President and CEO, Doug McMillon, also noted the retailer saw strong sales in categories like TVs, computing devices, and connected home — sales that also have ties to the pandemic which is forcing people to spend more time at home. He also said some consumers continued to stockpile items in coronavirus hotspots, like cleaning supplies, which were still often out-of-stock. Both cleaning supplies and paper goods (e.g., TP and paper towels) led Walmart’s consumable sales in the quarter.

The overall rise in grocery orders, meanwhile, can be partially attributed to the pandemic’s impacts and not just the ease of shopping for grocery items online. As more people have been cooking meals at home instead of dining out at restaurants, their grocery orders have also increased. Walmart said both grocery pickup and delivery saw “all-time high sales volumes” in the quarter.

The pandemic has been changing how consumers shop, too, the company pointed out. Instead of regular trips to the store, consumers now shop less frequently but buy more during each trip. Combined with the shift to e-commerce, that led to a 27% increase in comparable average ticket sizes in the quarter, while comparable transactions dropped 14%.

On the earnings call, McMillon briefly confirmed Walmart’s plans to introduce a membership service, as had been previously reported. The company is said to be working on its own alternative to Amazon Prime, dubbed Walmart+. But the launch has been repeatedly delayed, Vox recently reported. According to the CEO, Walmart has been testing the delivery component to the membership service since last year with its “Delivery Unlimited” program, which McMillon referred to as “a great base of an offer” for a broader membership program.

Today, Delivery Unlimited subscribers pay either $12.95 per month or $98 per year to order groceries online from Walmart.com without a per-order fee. Walmart+, however, will reportedly include other perks, like gas discounts and special product deals. McMillon didn’t speak to the specifics of its service, saying instead that Walmart will have more to offer when it’s ready to talk about it.

Overall, Walmart beat on earnings in the quarter, with revenue of $137.74 billion, topping estimates of $135.48 billion. Earnings per share came in at $1.56 adjusted, versus the expected $1.25. Net income also rose year-over-year to $6.48 billion, or $2.27 per share, up from $3.61 billion, or $1.26.

In less than three months and notwithstanding intervention, TikTok will be effectively banned in the U.S. unless an American company steps in to save it, after the Trump administration declared by executive order this week that the Chinese-built video sharing app is a threat to national security.

How much of a threat TikTok poses exactly remains to be seen. U.S. officials are convinced that the app could be compelled by Beijing to vacuum up reams of Westerners’ data for intelligence. Or is the app, beloved by millions of young American voters, simply a pawn in the Trump administration’s long political standoff with China?

Really, the answer is a bit of both — even if on paper TikTok is no worse than the homegrown threat to privacy posed by the Big Tech behemoths: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google . But the foreign threat from Beijing alone was enough that the Trump administration needed to crack down on the app — and the videos frequently critical of the administration’s actions.

For its part, TikTok says it will fight back against the Trump administration’s action.

This week’s Decrypted looks at TikTok amid its looming ban. We’ll look at why the ban is unlikely, even if privacy and security issues persist.

THE BIG PICTURE

Internet watchdog says a TikTok ban is a ‘seed of genuine security concern wrapped in a thick layer of censorship’

The verdict from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is clear: The U.S. can’t ban TikTok without violating the First Amendment. Banning the app would be a huge abridgment of freedom of speech, whether it’s forbidding the app stores from serving it or blocking it at the network level.

But there are still legitimate security and privacy concerns. The big issue for U.S. authorities is that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, has staff in China and is subject to Beijing’s rules.

Playdots — developer of the mobile games Dots, Two Dots and Dots & Co. — has reached an agreement to be acquired by publisher Take-Two Interactive.

Take-Two will pay $192 million for the deal, $90 million in cash and the remaining $102 million in stock.

Playdots was founded in 2014 by Paul Murphy and Patrick Moberg, spinning out of startup studio betaworks with $10 million in funding led by Tencent and Greycroft  It’s currently led by CEO Nir Efrat, a former King.com executive who joined Playdots in 2018.

In the acquisition announcement, Take-Two (best known for publishing major franchises like BioShock and NBA 2K, plus — through its Rockstar Games subsidiary — Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption) says that Erfat will continue to lead Playdots’ 70-person team.

Apparently the various Dots games have been downloaded more than 100 million times, with more than 80 million of those downloads coming from the most popular title, Two Dots.

In a statement, Michael Worosz, Take-Two’s executive vice president and head of strategy and independent publishing, said:

Our acquisition of Playdots will diversify and strengthen further Take-Two’s mobile game offerings, particularly within the casual, free-to-play segment. Two Dots continues to grow its audience and under the leadership of Nir, the addition of scavenger hunts, social leader boards and live-ops technology are enhancing the game and driving meaningful, long-term consumer engagement. We are very pleased to welcome Nir and the entire team at Playdots to the Take-Two family and are excited by the potential of their development pipeline and positive, long-term contributions to our business.

SpaceX has successfully launched 58 more Starlink satellites for its growing internet broadband constellation. This is the 11th batch of Starlink satellites to go up, bringing the total on orbit to well over 600. Today’s mission also carried three Planet satellites, and used a Falcon 9 first stage booster that broke a record by flying for the sixth time.

The launch took place at 10:31 AM EDT (7:31 PM PDT) from SpaceX’s launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It also included a recovery attempt for the record-setting reused booster, which performed a sixth landing (also record setting) at sea on SpaceX’s ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ floating drone landing barge. That successful recovery means that the booster can potentially be used yet again, breaking its own record set today once again in future.

Today’s launch vehicle also used a re-flown fairing, which had been recovered from SpaceX’s fourth Starlink mission and refurbished to use again. Overall, it represents the biggest achievement yet in SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s goal of eventually being able to fully reuse nearly every aspect of his company’s spacecraft for retreat missions, which should help dramatically reduce the overall cost of rocket flights.

As for Starlink, it appears to be progressing well towards SpaceX’s planned beta service launch sometime this year, which will cover parts of the U.S. and Canada. Recently, PCMag reported that Ookla’s Speedtest site for measuring internet connection speeds has been seeing some seemingly legitimate results for Starlink service, which is likely in early (possibly internal only) testing mode using the existing satellites on orbit.

The launch today also includes a launch recovery attempt, using SpaceX’s ‘Ms. Chief’ and ‘Ms. Tree’ ships at sea. Weather and other conditions will determine weather those attempt to catch the fairings as they fall from the sky slowed by parachutes, or whether they attempt to recover them from the sea after they hit the water, but we’ll provide an update on that aspect of the launch as information becomes available.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of Social Capital, does not do minority investing anymore. If he finds a startup he likes, he just buys it outright.

The billionaire co-founded Social Capital in 2011, and seven years later, he pivoted the investment firm into a technology holding company. The transition wasn’t one that the investors hired into Social Capital were expecting — or a direction in which they wanted to move with Palihapitiya — prompting virtually all of them to jump ship over time.

Palihapitiya, who said publicly in the aftermath of that exodus that he doesn’t think investing is a team sport, is now modeling his strategy after that of Warren Buffett. He wants Social Capital to be similar to Berkshire Hathaway, which owns businesses and holds billion-dollar stakes in companies like Apple and Coca-Cola.

One way Palihapitiya plans to achieve that scale centers on creating special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. SPACs are blank-check companies which raise a bunch of cash, go public and then merge with a private company. The esoteric series of steps allows a private firm to go public without the strenuous work of a traditional IPO. In 2019, Social Capital made $1.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents, due to its investment in Slack, which staged a direct listing, and Virgin Galactic, which went public through a SPAC.

But the other, quieter tactic he is using to pursue his Buffet-like ambitions? Acquiring businesses one by one.

The investor tells TechCrunch that he has acquired Hustle, a startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures. Hustle co-founder Roddy Lindsay worked on Palihapitiya’s team on Facebook for over a decade, where they got to know each other closely. But it wasn’t their shared time at Facebook that sealed the deal. It was their shared vision of a world where text-messaging would kill e-mail.

The company is one of many startups that think e-mail will no longer be a reality in a few decades. If that’s the case, then businesses will need new ways to convert users into customers. So, Hustle lets businesses communicate with users in a personalized one-on-one way with, ideally, higher conversion rates.

But the startup’s real differentiator lies in its unabashed strategy to not sell to Republican parties or Republican candidates. Steven Pease, the CEO of Hustle, said that “many non-partisan customers use our platform, but we do apply a filter when considering organizations that are at odds with the Company’s values.”

This year, Hustle sent out more than 1 billion text messages. The company has north of a $10 million annual revenue run rate, Palihapitiya said, adding that the company is profitable.

Politicians have long leveraged technology to spread their message (take Donald Trump’s Twitter, for example) and communicate with their supporters. But, as we approach the United States’ 2020 presidential election in November, direct-to-consumer political technology used to activate voters feels even more prescient.

“Whether it’s every town for gun control, whether it’s Planned Parenthood, whether it’s the Democratic National Party, there’s hundreds and hundreds [of thousands?] of customers here that are going to try to activate their customer base to do all kinds of things,” Palihapitiya said. “And I would like to own such a platform over the next 20 to 30 years.”

Hustle is Social Capital’s third acquisition in the past three years. In 2018, Social Capital bought a healthcare business that has a repository of data around human physiology. Last year, the firm scooped up a mental health startup that’s centered around software-based treatments and tracks how users progress. Palihapitiya declined to disclose the names of either investment, citing competitive advantages in keeping them out of the press for now.

“I like businesses that build non-obvious data links,” he said, noting that it is unlike AI, machine learning and other futuristic technologies.

Although his SPAC returns could fuel acquisitions, he says that his deals have been funded through personal capital.

Palihapitiya’s long-term strategy for Hustle is to create an empire around it. He plans to acquire auxiliary businesses that see $5 to $15 million in ARR, consolidate them, and “now all of a sudden, you can see us getting to hundreds of millions of ARR.”

The Hustle deal closed in about a week. He says that investing out of a permanent balance sheet of his own capital lets him underwrite decisions faster than a traditional venture capital firm, which lines up with the investor’s general anti-VC sentiment.

He pointed to Credit Karma and Intuit’s merger that is yet to close.

“We’re still waiting for that deal,” Palihapitiya said. “You know, I couldn’t write an $8.8 billion acquisition myself. But I could write a $5 billion one.”

Buildkite’s founding team–Lachlan Donald, Keith Pitt and Tim Lucas–working remotely

Buildkite, a Melbourne-based company that provides a hybrid continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for software developers, announced today that it has raised AUD $28 million (about USD $20.2 million) in Series A funding, bring its valuation to more than AUD $200 million (about USD $145 million).

The funding was led by OpenView, an investment firm that focuses on growth-stage enterprise software companies, with participation from General Catalyst.

This round is the company’s first since Buildkite raised about AUD $200,000 in seed funding when it was founded in 2013.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Lachlan Donald told TechCrunch that Buildkite didn’t seek more funding earlier because it was growing profitably. In fact, the company turned away interested investors “because we wanted to focus on sustainable growth and maintain control of our destiny.”

But Donald said they were open to investment from OpenView and General Catalyst because they see the two investors as “true partners as we enter and define this next generation of CI/CD.”

Buildkite’s team is small, with just 26 employees. “We’re a lean, focused team, so their expert advice and guidance will help more software teams around the world discover Buildkite,” Donald said. He added that part of the funding round will be used to give 42X returns to early investors and shareholders, and the rest will be used on product development.

In a statement about the funding, OpenView partner Mackey Craven said, “The global pandemic and the resulting economic uncertainty underlines the importance for companies to maximize efficiencies and build for growth. As the world continues to build digital-first applications, we believe Buildkite’s unique approach will be the new enterprise standard of CI/CD and we’re excited to be supporting them in realizing this ambition.”

Continuous integration gives software teams an automated way to develop and test applications, making collaboration more efficient, while continuous delivery refers to the process of pushing code to environments for further testing by other teams, or deploying it to customers. CI/CD platforms make it easier for fast-growing tech companies to test and deliver software. Buildkite says it now has more than 1,000 customers, including Shopify, Pinterest and Wayfair.

As part of the round, Jean-Michel Lemieux, Shopify’s chief technology officer, and Ashley Smith, chief revenue officer at Gatsby and OpenView venture partner, will join Buildkite’s board.

The increased use of online applications caused by the COVID-19 pandemic means there is more demand for CI/CD platform, since engineering teams need to work more quickly.

“A good example is Shopify, one of our longstanding partners. They came to us after they outgrew their previous hosted CI provider,” Donald said. “Their challenge is one we see across all of customers—they needed to reduce build time and scale their team across multiple time zones. Once they wrapped Buildkite into their development flow, they saw a 75% reduction in build wait times. They grew their team by 300% and have still been able to keep build time under 10 minutes.”

Other CI platforms available include Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis, Codeship and GitLab. Co-founder and chief technology officer Keith Pitt said one of the ways that BuildKite differentiates from its rivals is its focus on security, which prompted his interest in building the platform in the first place.

“Back in 2013, my then-employer asked that I stop using a cloud-based CI/CD platform due to security concerns, but I found the self-hosted alternatives to be incredibly outdated,” Pitt said. “I realized a hybrid approach was the solution for testing and deploying software at scale without compromising security or performance, but was surprised to find a hybrid CI/CD tool didn’t exist yet. I decided to create it myself, and Buildkite was born.”