A fast-growing business which helps companies build and operate better mobile applications is plotting rapid expansion in its UK office.
Bitrise, which has bases in Budapest, Hungary, San Francisco and London revealed its plans to BusinessCloud following a $20 million funding round.
“We currently have seven people in London,” VP for growth Hendrik Haandrikman told BusinessCloud. “It’s a feature team – developers and product people.
“Our growth plans there are pretty aggressive. There’s a lot of internationally experienced tech talent in the city and – even though the competition for those people is fierce – we’re confident a lot of people will see the massive opportunity joining Bitrise at this stage represents.
“I think it’s safe to assume that we’ll have a few dozen there by the end of the year.”
The Series B investment was led by Partech, joined by new investor Zobito and saw participation from existing investors OpenOcean, Y Combinator and Fiedler Capital. Partech’s Reza Malekzadeh and OpenOcean’s Ekaterina Almasque will join the company’s board.
“Mobile is the world’s most popular computing platform and critical to every business’ long term success,” explained Bitrise co-founder and CEO Barnabas Birmacher.
“At the same time, developing for mobile is fundamentally different than any other form of software development. By acknowledging those differences, we’ve crafted a platform that unburdens and empowers close to 100,000 mobile developers to deliver their best possible work.
“We allow them to overcome the unique challenges inherent to building and operating mobile applications, from that first spark of a new idea all the way to massive scale.
“The fact that half of the mobile unicorn start-ups have continued using Bitrise from their very early stages, through billion-dollar valuations, IPOs and beyond, is an amazing example of that value in action.”
Bitrise currently processes over 1.5 million monthly mobile builds for Android, iOS, React Native, Xamarin, Flutter and more.
“We actually got our start in the UK: when Bitrise was founded, the founders moved from Hungary to London for a few months to find product market fit,” added Haandrikman.
“It was the closest tech hub and it’s the reason the UK was our number two market worldwide, behind the US, until very recently when Japan surpassed it.
“We don’t have an office in Asia yet, but on the mid- to long-term, the plan is four hubs: San Fran, London, Budapest and – probably – Tokyo.”