XebiaLabs, the Boston-based software startup that helps companies automate DevOps functions, announced a healthy $100 million Series B investment led by Susquehanna Growth Equity and Accel. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $121.5 million.
Derek Langone, Xebia’s CEO says they raised the money out of a desire to expand more rapidly. “You always want to raise money for the right reasons. The right reason was growth. We had enough money in the bank to keep the business going, but we wanted to expand our partnerships and bring more engineers in,” he said. The company wouldn’t have been able to do some of these kinds of things without an infusion of capital.
Langone says that as every company becomes a software company, it increases the amount complexity associated with managing the software environment. His company tries to help by bringing a high level of automation to that process.
He points out that there is a huge expense in terms of time and labor involved in building and maintaining the software systems that run a typical large business. “We streamline that process and redeploy intelligent creative engineers on higher value activities instead of writing plumbing code to move stuff around,” Langone explained.
He says his company’s software creates a lot of that underlying code for the customer, saving them the time and expense of doing it manually. “As applications become more and more complex and live in cloud and on prem, that level of complexity means the amount of manual work to create those routes gets to the point where it’s almost impossible to accomplish in an organization that has hundreds or thousands of applications,” he said.
They have 200 customers including large enterprises like Bank of America, Keybank, GE and United Health. The company grew revenue by 117 percent year over year last year and perhaps that kind of pace along with the size of their customers is what caught the attention of its investors. They bestowed a huge amount of money on the company for a Series B investment when companies are often just trying to prove a product-market fit.
Xebia has actually been around for 10 years, so perhaps this isn’t a typical Series B round you might see for a young startup. The company actually launched in 2008 before DevOps, the idea that you divide the tasks of developer and operations into a distinct set of responsibilities, was on the radar of most companies, especially the large organizations that Xebia services today.
As the company brings on new customers, it will need to expand not just engineering, but also customer support. With 140 employees spread across several offices in US, EU and India, you can be sure they will expanding that number with the new money.