A Silicon Valley giant has opened its first EMEA office in London as it seeks to expand in Europe.
CircleCI, based in San Francisco, is a platform which allows tech companies to introduce software innovation at scale.
Tech veteran Nick Mills has joined as general manager to help EMEA-based customers such as Deliveroo, TransferWise, Spotify and Monzo grow and scale using the CI/CD platform and also drive adoption and business growth within the region.
CircleCI provides developers with continuous integration and delivery tools to maximise build efficiency, allowing them to focus on what matters. Examples of technologies that might benefit from using CI/CD are self-driving cars, Bitcoin exchanges or music platforms.
The platform runs more than 30 million jobs per month for more than 600,000 developers across 30,000 organisations.
CircleCI recently closed a $56m funding round, bringing the company’s total investment to $115.5m since opening its San Francisco headquarters in 2011.
“We have a phenomenal base of established and growing customers from some of the most innovative companies, not just in Europe, but in the world, such as Deliveroo, TransferWise, Spotify, Monzo, and others,” said CEO Jim Rose (below).
“The tech sector in Europe is booming with nearly 160 unicorns and growing, making now the perfect time for CircleCI to fuel business growth and innovation within the region.”
The new EMEA office will be CircleCI’s second international hub, following Tokyo which opened in 2018. About 10 percent of CircleCI employees are based in the EMEA office, with that number expected to grow to 17 percent by the end of 2019.
Known for his track record of leading international expansion and growth at enterprise companies such as Microsoft, Facebook and Stripe, and venture-backed startups such as Aldelphic, Mills will be responsible for building CircleCI’s revenue and non-engineering teams, with the goal of increasing regional adoption and helping users better understand how CircleCI can help them optimise their software development processes to deliver software with maximum performance, scale and stability.
“CircleCI is seen as a critical enabler for our user base of tech-forward companies that value a best-in-class CI/CD tool for driving developer productivity,” said Mills (above).
“We’re enabling them to build better and more stable software at a faster rate, and to accelerate the pace of product delivery and value creation that comes with that.
“I’m thrilled to join such a cutting-edge start-up that has the potential to help other companies create significant economic value in this region.”
CircleCI user Emily Atkinson, a software engineer at Conde Nast International, said: “One of the interesting things I’ve found working with CircleCI is that as an infrastructure team we’re now able to go out and pair with all the other product engineering teams and allow them to use CircleCI to develop their pipelines in ways that meet their needs.
“We can work with those teams directly to customize their pipelines to make them as efficient as possible. CircleCI is valuable to us because it facilitates that DevOps mindset.”
Adam Nowak, software development practice lead at Netguru, added: “Flexibility and high performance are the top factors our clients are looking for. Because we get that from CircleCI, our growth and the offering we provide our clients are simply much better with CircleCI than without.
“In order to provide excellent services ourselves, we need to rely on excellent service providers like CircleCI.”