We just raised a 20M$ series B. This is what that means for you, for us, and the future of Bitrise.
Bitrise founders Viktor Benei, Daniel Balla, and I are excited to share that we just raised 20 million USD to help you develop — and operate — better mobile applications. This series B investment round was led by Partech and joined by new investor Zobito, with participation from existing investors OpenOcean, Y Combinator, and Fiedler Capital.
I’m thrilled to have Partech and Zobito on board: It’s amazing to see how their support is already accelerating our ability to address real challenges for mobile developers. I’m especially grateful to OpenOcean, Y Combinator, and Fiedler Capital for reinvesting: It shows continued commitment to the mission and speaks to their belief in the platform, the team, and the problem we’re solving.
I’m also thankful for the incredible group of people working on Bitrise day in day out, and the tens of thousands of developers that trust us with their mobile development processes. We honestly wouldn’t have gotten where we are today without you.
Build and operate better mobile applications
Our mission is to make building and operating world-class mobile applications easier and faster.
We want to empower you to do your best possible work. Not just by automating across different parts of the process, but also by providing you the tools, data, and insights you need when you need them. This leaves you to spend your time working on the impactful stuff instead of tasks that could be automated away or digging through scattered services for insights.
We raised this latest investment round to accelerate our efforts towards this mission. This is exactly what we plan on doing with this money:
An independent Bitrise
Mobile development is massive. At the same time, mobile developers still don’t have the same robust set of tools and services that a lot of other developers enjoy. There’s a reason for this: In a lot of ways, mobile development is fundamentally different from other types of software, so there are some unique challenges to overcome. We’re doing just that. We believe there’s a place for an independent company providing a fully featured DevOps platform at scale, specifically for mobile. We plan on being that company. This means that the end goal here isn’t a quick exit or a sale to cash out:
Everyone that signed that cheque knows what they’re in for. We’re in it for the long haul.
Bitrise as a mobile DevOps platform
Daniel already touched on this subject in his recent roadmap post, but our acquisition of Outlyer earlier this year was a first step in executing on a vision: Bitrise as a mobile DevOps platform, where we make your life easier through all phases of the DevOps process. Bitrise, like you know and love it today, will continue to be, but — if you want to — you’ll be able to augment the tasks and processes you use us for with exciting new features and functionalities that go beyond integration, testing and deployment. This means we’re adding performance monitoring to our capabilities in the very short term, but also that we’ll explore other parts of mobile development and operations.
Bitrise as a single screen solution
The recent launch of our test reporting feature was a sneak peek of what’s to come: As we unify the different stages of mobile app development and operations, we also aim to give you a single place to monitor, manage and automate these stages. This is why —in addition to the step library — we’re adding a system of add-ons that offer a deeper level of integration and will increasingly take away the necessity to work across scattered point solutions. You’ll spend less time switching from tool to tool and looking for the data you need, and will be able to share across diverse teams from a shared context.
Add-ons won’t replace steps, they’ll augment them: As with our expansion across different phases of the DevOps process, you’ll always be able to pick and choose where you use a step, where you use an addon, or where you don’t want to use Bitrise at all.
Bitrise at scale
As more and more developers depend on Bitrise to support and enhance their daily work it’s more and more crucial to have the best performance, as well as stability and reliability. We’ll be investing in more capacity, adding redundancies where possible and expanding our infrastructure globally.
Our global footprint
We ended 2018 with roughly 30 people in Budapest and now, 6 months later, we’re 65 across 3 offices and 2 continents. Over the coming months and years, our numbers will increase as will our geographic spread. We’re supporting a global user base and will increasingly be in your timezone, country or city through remote team members and a growing number of international offices. We need to be where you are to better support you as you build amazing products on Bitrise, but also because we need your help.
Thank you!
Bitrise was built by mobile developers, for mobile developers. Now, a little under 5 years since we started, the problems we’re solving are less and less the ones we experienced ourselves, and increasingly the problems of companies crafting mobile experiences way beyond anything we ever built.
(Seems Steve was on to something there...)
We’re doing this through the continued feedback and support we receive from you. Your feature requests, your input when you drop by our booth at a conference, the feedback during customer meetings and all the other ways in which you share with us have made Bitrise what it is today. As we enter this new phase, that input is more critical than ever. It’s why we’ve started sharing our roadmap, it’s why we’re going on more road trips than ever before and it’s why next month we’re kicking off the very first Bitrise user group in Tokyo.
go all-in and join the team
Do you want to contribute more, though? Consider developing a step or go all-in and join the team. Check out our open positions. Don’t see anything that fits your skills? Just send us your details and we’ll see if we can find something.
