CloudBees Inc. snagged $23.5 million in a fourth round of funding on Tuesday to fuel its newly-found focus on continuous integration, which has become one of the hottest movements in the development community with the rise of the hybrid cloud. The startup has become an unexpected champion of the trend.

Former JBoss technologists Sacha Labourey and  Kohsuke Kawaguchi originally founded CloudBees as a platform-as-a-service provider, but changed course last year to escape the intense competition that has formed in that market. The company now focuses on monetizing Jenkins, an open-source project that Kawaguchi created earlier in his career that stands as the tool of choice for contentious integration.

The system enables development teams to centralize the work done on different components of an application in a shared repository. Under the continuous integration mantra, updates are merged several times a day as opposed to only when the project reaches its final stage, which significantly reduces the amount of backtracking needed to identify and resolve errors.

The productivity boost from that approach can enable developers to move much quicker than traditional methods allow. Some bleeding-edge web companies such as Shopify Inc. employ the technique to roll out over a hundred updates to their services each and every day, which was unthinkable in the old world of on-premise enterprise software, where 6- and 12-month release cycles are the norm.

CloudBees has made it its mission to bring continuous integration into the traditional organizations that still have to deal with drawn-out updates, a goal that the new funding should help promote. The startup will use the capital to drive demand for its commercial version of Jenkins, which adds security and reliability features over the core project to make it more viable in enterprise environments. It also offers a complementary plug-in aimed at simplifying the management of large-scale deployments.

Existing investors Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures led the round, which also saw the participation of Blue Cloud Ventures, JBoss alumni Bob Bickel and Marc Fleury and VMware co-founder Ed Bugnion. The funding brings CloudBees’ total raised to just under $50 million.

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