DevOps platform company Circle Internet Services Inc. announced today it has closed on a $100 million round of funding that takes its valuation to $1.7 billion.

The news came as the company announced it has acquired a software release orchestration platform provider, called Vamp BV, for an undisclosed price.

CircleCI said the $100 million Series F round of financing was led by Greenspring Associates. Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital and Next Equity Partners also participated in the round, which brings its total amount raised to $315.5 million.

The raise follows a $100 million Series E funding round in April 2020.

CircleCI sells a continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD platform for DevOps that gives software developers and engineers access to automated processes that help them to develop and ship software faster, with higher-quality code and fewer potential faults when it goes into production.

CI/CD refers to combined processes that involve frequent changes to code that’s continually being pushed live to maintain a service or application while also allowing developers to add new features in parallel. The aim of these processes is to reduce the number of defects and potential conflicts during the integration and delivery of code using automated systems that verify code, flag potential problems and test integrated code to identify bottlenecks and issues.

The company said today that its CI/CD platform, which is used by more than 1 million developers, has become a lot more popular since its last funding round, and that it now handles more than 2.5 million job processes per day. At the same time, the company has more than doubled its employee headcount to 550 members.

CircleCI has also added a slew of new features to its CI/CD platform over the past 12 months, including integrations for Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management platform, and the addition of an “Insights dashboard” last year that provides developers with more actionable data to optimize their application development pipelines. Then in February it debuted secure and private configuration options on its platform, known as “private orbs,” which are reusable packages that automate repeated processes.

The acquisition of Vamp signals that yet more new features will be added to the CircleCI platform. Vamp is a Dutch startup that leverages Kubernetes-based application environments to provide some very useful release orchestration capabilities for applications built using software containers. Using Vamp’s platform, developers can build complex, multistage release strategies that include automated so-called canary releases, blue/green, multitenant and A/B tests to ensure their software updates are deployed without issues.

CircleCI said the combination of its CI/CD platform and Vamp’s release orchestration tools will be “transformative” for software engineering teams.

“The emphasis on change validation is at the core of where we see the CI/CD market heading,” CircleCI Chief Executive Jim Rose said of the acquisition. “Vamp’s product and talent, combined with ours, accelerates us to provide the solutions our customers need to quickly and confidently build, test and deploy software.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said software is the lifeblood of enterprises and one of the key influencers of an enterprise’s fate.

“Nothing is more costly to the success and reputation of an enterprise than a code asset that is not deployed in a timely fashion,” the analyst said. “This is why the continuity of the software pipeline matters, and that is what Circle CI delivers. So it’s no surprise to see it secure more funding, which helps the company by enabling critical acquisitions like with VAMP today to improve its release automation and orchestration capabilities.”

Regarding today’s funding, Rose said the new capital would allow the company to double down on its mission to increase developer productivity. “It also opens doors for business growth opportunities in three areas that we see as the next frontier of software development: continuous validation, data and insights, and managing software complexity,” he said.

Image: CircleCI