Today, CloudBees announced that we raised $150 million in equity from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with new investments from funds affiliated with Morgan Stanley Private Credit (“Morgan Stanley”), Bridgepoint Credit, HSBC, Golub Capital, and Delta-v Capital—becoming a unicorn in the process. Reaching this milestone makes me incredibly proud of what we have achieved as a team!
How It All Began
When we started CloudBees back in 2010, none of us imagined that a decade later more than 500 Bees in 24 countries would help so many developers in so many organizations have such a great impact through software. It’s been an exciting journey and I’d like to thank all of the Bees for making this possible: no step is more important than another when you run a marathon.
This specific “marathon” started with a clear vision: to empower developers to make an impact by streamlining the path from idea to production. That vision remained unchanged and has been our companion while we navigated the road from Platform as a Service (PaaS) to the “Enterprise Jenkins Company” to becoming the DevOps leader in enterprise software delivery. We might have moved fast, but we’ve stayed focused on delivering value to teams and companies all over the world by helping them orchestrate software delivery in a holistic fashion, while unleashing the power of “continuous everything.” If you want to know more about our journey to the present day, you can read more in this blog post I wrote when CloudBees turned 10.
Where We Are Today
At the start of 2021, we went through an important transition that also made me very proud. After 11 years as CEO, I handed over the baton to Stephen DeWitt: leading a company below $100 million is a very different job than above that mark.
This change made it possible for me to focus on what I absolutely love the most but was increasingly missing: working on product and strategy. It also enabled me to put CloudBees in the best possible hands for the next phase of our journey. Ten months after this transition, I couldn’t be happier about the result! Not only have we raised $150 million and accelerated our growth, but Stephen has also formed an amazing executive team (our most recent team members include Audrey Zhao as Chief Financial Officer, Jinny Jun as Chief People Officer, and Dinesh Keswani as Chief Technology Officer). We were fortunate enough to meet face-to-face for the first time a few weeks ago and the chemistry was just great—which is clearly one of the secret ingredients to being successful.
Pictured left to right: Stephen DeWitt, CEO; John Tzioufas, Chief Revenue Officer; Peter Meechan, Chief Corporate and Business Development Officer; Mick Cuffee, Senior Analyst Corporate Development and Chief of Staff; Shawn Ahmed, Chief Marketing Officer; Dinesh Keswani, Chief Technology Officer; and Sacha Labourey, Chief Strategy Officer. Pictured in front: Jinny Jun, Chief People Officer and Audrey Zhao, Chief Financial Officer. (Missing from this picture is Laurence Poussot, co-founder and CAO, who couldn’t travel.)
Where We’re Going
Now, let me talk about the way forward. The biggest portion of that investment is going to be allocated to our products. We are a product company and this is how we make our customers thrive. First of all, we will be extensively investing in our core business to add a lot of depth to our products, but also to broaden our scope. Very importantly, we will also be doing big investments in UX across our offering. As software delivery practices mature, our customers are increasingly uninterested in “legacy” DevOps market silos/segmentations. They ultimately care about their overall “jobs to be done,” cross-cutting through multiple traditional tools—which simply requires a better way!
In parallel, we will also be investing in the next generation of our software delivery offering, which I’m obviously super excited about. We will do this without creating a barrier between “legacy” and “next gen:” instead, we will make it possible for our customers to gradually enter this new paradigm, at their own pace, based on their unique traits. Remember, this is all about the journey…
In order to achieve this, we have started recruiting extensively in the product organization, so if you want to join this amazing team, hop in—and let’s continue this marathon together!
Onward,
Sacha