Cloud continual delivery service Wercker has received a seed investment from an A-list group of investors. The round was led by Shamrock Ventures with additional support from Greylock Venture Partners, and Amsterdam-based micro VC Vitulum Ventures. Vitulum provides seed capital for Internet and mobile startups. Company executives did not reveal the amount of funding they received, but sources close to the deal say that Wercker raised close to $1 million.
Wercker helps developers test and deploy code often. Small bits of code get pushed out by the developers to the SaaS platform at a rapid pace. In the process, developers see the connections between each other, building on the social dynamics that come with pushing out code. The goal: increase velocity of the development process.
For a startup, Wercker has attracted an impressive group of supporters. Members of its new advisory board include Dan Harple, managing director of Shamrock Ventures and EIR at MIT; Jan Pieter Scheerder, former president of SunSoft; and Arthur van Hoff, EIR at Redpoint Ventures and former CTO of Flipboard.
Wercker was part of the 2012 Rockstart Accelerator startup incubator based in Amsterdam, and most recently participated in Mozilla’s WebFWD program. NexusLabs, a foundation based in Amsterdam and at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., fosters innovation and supported Wercker with refining their pitch and helped bring venture capital parties from the United States to the table.
Wercker is a new breed of service that fits well with emerging new platforms that help developers build apps. GitHub provides a way for developers to post code and collaborate on projects. A service like Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) for developing apps and deploying to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Wercker hopes to fit right in the middle, connecting through APIs to GitHub and Heroku and more services at a later point.
Hernandez van Leuffen said they are considering integrating with Cloud Foundry, the open PaaS developed by VMware. That would get them access to the enterprise hybrid and private cloud markets. In the meantime, van Leuffen said the company will add its service to the Heroku Add-On Marketplace and will build out for AWS. The service is now free to use. It is in private beta.
Wercker competes with a host of services such as CloudBees, CircleCi and newcomers like CloudMunch.
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