Continuous delivery automation company Circle Internet Services Inc., known as CircleCI, today said it has landed $31 million in a late-stage funding.

The Series C round is the company’s largest to date, bringing its total funding to $56.5 million. Top Tier Capital Partners led the round, which also saw the participation of Industry Ventures and Heavybit, as well as existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and DFJ Ventures.

CircleCI provides a platform for developers that follow the DevOps philosophy, pushing out updates to their software applications on a daily or weekly basis. The company’s platform provides products and services that ease the rapid deployment of release code by automating the build, test and deploy process. The company offers two versions of its platform, CircleCI Enterprise and CircleCI for OS X.

CircleCI said it has made some significant progress since its last funding round in May 2016, processing more than 7 million software builds per month. Updates to the firm’s platform, delivered in CircleCI 2.0, have reduced build times by up to 50 percent in some cases.

The company also grew its customer base, which includes among others Facebook Inc., Lyft Inc., Spotify AB, Adobe Inc., Shopify Inc. and Docker Inc. More than 300,000 developers now use the platform, too.

At the same time, the company has grown its workforce substantially, including a number of strategic hires in the last year. It now counts more than 120 employees on its payroll.

“In a few short years, we have become one of the largest build systems on the planet,” Jim Rose, chief executive officer at CircleCI, said in a statement.

Asked for more details on what automation features we can expect to see added to CircleCI’s platform, Rose said the company was planning to add new features capable of proactively alerting customers about problems with their latest builds before they cause problems that could lead to apps failing. CircleCI will then be able to “intelligently re-route customers around issues,” Rose said.

“There is a lot of work to be done here,” Rose conceded. “But ultimately our vision is to make CI/CD less of a reactive pipeline and turn it into a smart system that delivers huge leaps in productivity.”

Image: CircleCI