Software delivery platform Shippable raises $8M

Shippable allows users to containerize and ship software applications by automating the lifecycle

Shippable, a cloud service for software developers, has raised $8 million in Series A funding, the company has announced. Madrona Venture led the round, with participation from existing investors including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Divergent Ventures and Founders Co-Op. 

The company had previously raised a seed round of $2.1 million, bringing its total venture capital to $10.1 million. 

Founded in 2013, Shippable is part of the Docker ecosystem, and it allows users to containerize and ship software applications more efficiently by automating the application lifecycle from code to production.

"Shippable wants to make software development more efficient by removing friction as software code travels from a developer’s machine to production. This enables companies to innovate faster since it helps accelerate time to market and produce better quality software," Shippable co-founder and CEO Avi Cavale, (who was also a nationally ranked ping pong player as well as National Champion Motorcycle racer in India), told me in an interview.

Here's how it works: a customer signs up for Shippable and connects their source control to the platform. The customer then writes a simple configuration file and enables their code repository on Shippable. After that, each time Shippable detects a code change, it will run a whole bunch of automated processes and immediately give the customer feedback about whether the code change broke anything and whether the application is ready to ship.

"This ensures that the source code is always shippable," said Cavale. "We will also deploy to any environment specified in the configuration file like AWS, Digital Ocean or GAE."

 Among the competitors that in this space include CircleCI and TravisCI, which are competitors to Shippable in the cloud, while Jenkins is a competitor in the enterprise.

"We are the only service that offers containerized continuous delivery. This greatly increases the efficiency of CI since it also allows us to offer automated functional testing, as opposed to just unit testing offered by other companies, and a reduced dev/test lab footprint," Cavale said.

In addition, he told that the service is available in "multiple flavors," including "multi-tenant, dedicated hosts which is a hybrid model, and on-premise which is currently in private beta."

The company has grown 300% since it launched Shippable 2.0 in early September, and it now has over 25,000 users and 3,000 organizations using the product. Those customers are already seeing a 70% reduction in lab footprint of servers on an average.

"With a containerized approach, more defects are caught closer to the source (the developer) making the code bug-free very early in the cycle. This helps accelerate time to market and improve quality of the software being released to customers," according to Cavale.

Shippable will use the funding to build out its executive team. It currently has 14 employees right now, spread across Seattle (HQ), Bangalore, India and the Bay Area, most of whom are engineers. Among the positions that will be filled are COO, sales and marketing, and "a role that will own customer success."

In addition it will use the funding to expand to the enterprise.

"First and foremost, a majority of enterprises are still using very antiquated methods of software development and a significant portion of the process is manual. Having a COTS product that allows them to solve this problem overnight is an attractive proposition for them," Cavale said.

"Second, the larger the projects are, the more impact our solution will have both in terms of cost savings as well as efficiency gains. As a result, our value propositions amplify making it even more valuable for Enterprises."

In addition to the funding news, it was also announced that Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, will be joining the board of directors at Shippable.

"Tim has a wealth of experience in the enterprise space. Shippable is laser-focused on this market and he will act as a strategic advisor to the company as it moves in that direction," said Cavale.