I officially broke this news when I introduced Avi at last Thursday’s TechStars Seattle Demo Day, but I wanted to follow up with a blog post for those who weren’t able to be there in person.
Shippable is an enterprise-grade, hosted continuous integration (CI) service for software development teams that need to increase agility + throughput while driving down error rates in shipped code.
The company was founded by two Microsoft veterans, Avi Cavale and Manisha Sahasrabudhe, and their experiences there offered many first-hand lessons on the challenges of building + shipping high-quality software with large, globally-distributed teams of developers.
We were excited about the technical chops of the team when we first selected them for TechStars, but what really got our attention during the program was the Shippable team’s agility at turning extremely challenging customer requirements — from demanding early customers like Twitter and OpsCode — into deployed product. Their relentless focus on the customer, coupled with the team’s insane product throughput, made Shippable a standout in our strongest TechStars class yet.
The broader context for our investment was the growing tide of developer enthusiasm for “containerized” software deployment — pioneered by the Docker open source project (a great overview deck on containerization can be found here).
As enterprise software investors, we’re very familiar with the strategic pressure large firms feel to increase their product agility while maintaining code quality, scaling and security. This broad category of business needs — known colloquially as “DevOps” — has become a major area of focus for every large company that relies on internally-produced software to run its business.
We’re incredibly excited to be part of the seed-stage syndicate that’s supporting Shippable in their effort to bring the agility and quality of continuous integration to the emerging world of containerized DevOps.
Congrats to the Shippable team on their graduation from TechStars and looking forward to what’s next!