Our customers have often said to us that we’re the best-kept secret in the DevOps space. While humbling, being a best-kept secret is something we consider to be more of a bug than a feature 😀 So we set out on a mission to change that, and to shout from the rooftops about Buildkite. I’m excited to announce today that as part of that mission we’ve raised $28M AUD from OpenView and General Catalyst (at a valuation of $200M AUD) and with it comes some extraordinary new people and partnerships.

Joining our board alongside my co-founders Keith Pitt, Tim Lucas and I, are Jean-Michel Lemieux aka JML (CTO at Shopify, ex-Atlassian) and Ashley Smith (CRO at Gatsby, ex-GitLab). They bring new superpowers with their decades of industry experience and developer community building, and are already helping us focus and grow.

As a proudly independent company that has focused on building a profitable business with sustainable growth, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could take our time and be very selective about the investors we chose to work with. We chose OpenView for their product-led mindset, and General Catalyst for their broad experience and industry reach. Datadog co-founder Olivier Pomel invested a minority stake, along with several of our wonderful team who wanted to invest as well.

Seven years ago, long before I expected to join Buildkite as a co-founder and CEO, I was using the product in my role as CTO of 99designs. After years of cobbling together tools and waiting longer and longer for builds as our product grew, Buildkite showed me that it’s possible to actually love your CI/CD tool and the effect it can have on a team’s productivity. It’s been humbling and exciting to see so many other great teams, such as Shopify, Wayfair and Intercom adopt Buildkite and rethink the way they deliver software.

In many ways, we feel like we’ve just scratched the surface of what CI/CD can do around helping software teams move faster and be more productive. We’re excited about what is next! ❤️