CircleCI Raises $1.5M From Eric Ries And Heroku Founders For Platform To Test Web Apps

CircleCI, a continuous integration platform for web application developers, has announced $1.5 millon in seed funding from a group of individual investors. The investors participating include original Heroku founders and Eric Ries, founder of The Lean Startup, whose company IMVU pioneered many of the techniques that CircleCI has developed into a product portfolio.

Joining early Heroku investors Baseline and Harrison Metal are Heroku founders James Lindenbaum and Adam Wiggins, SV Angel, 500 Startups, Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics and Jason Seats, founder of Slicehost.

CircleCI describes itself as Heroku for testing, providing continuous integration and deployment for development teams. Its goal is to increase productivity and the speed at which they deliver code to customers. The company models itself after companies such as GitHub, which have leveraged the cloud to create developer tools.

CircleCI was founded by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner. Biggar is a Y Combinator alumni who has a PhD in computer science and previously worked at Mozilla, where he experienced first hand the problem CircleCI solves.

In an email interview, Biggar cited the depth of its service as its major differentiator. He said they designed the infrastructure with speed in mind. As we are seeing with other new startups, the ability to do parallel processing gives it a huge advantage.

In addition, we offer parallelism whereby we can split tests across up to 16 machines, running them that much faster. For large teams with large test suites, this is incredible – reducing the developer feedback loop from an hour to just minutes.

Biggar said direct competitors are RailsOnFire and tddium. He said a number of other services have been announced but are not launched. He said they also have some indirect competitors that offer similar services, such as CloudBees and CISimple.