CircleCI doubles headcount to 19 people

CircleCI, which raised $6 million from venture capital investors DFJ at the start of the year, has since doubled its headcount to 19 people.

Paul Biggar, the chief executive of the Silicon Valley-based firm that helps developers test and produce code faster, said on a recent trip to Dublin: "We'd only hired developers up until recently but we knew we had to build out sales and marketing. We are starting to hire in those areas."

The 32-year-old co-founder of CircleCI said he had hired Nick Gottlieb, a software engineer, to help market and expand sales. Bigger said CircleCI had 1,000 clients and $1 million in revenue in January when DFJ, which has previously backed Hotmail and Skype, made the decision to invest.

He said he could not comment on current revenue but added: “We have doubled our staff numbers since January so that gives an idea.”

He said the funding from DFJ gave CircleCI time to build its business. “It depends on the team how quickly we grow. If we stop hiring now we can keep going for four years [on current funding], but if we keep growing at the pace we are it will only be 18 months,” Biggar said.

CircleCI had initially grown by focusing on helping small start-ups but it was staying with them as they expanded as well as targeting larger firms. "Our clients include Kickstarter [the crowd-funding website], Shopify [an ecommerce software firm] and Intercom [an Irish-Californian software firm]," he said.

“We were mainly working with start-ups to medium-sized companies with 50 to 200 developers,” Biggar said. “But we have big companies using CircleCi too like BSkyB. Typically with people in bigger companies we’re working with their innovation teams.”

Other seed or angel investors in CircleCI include Baseline Ventures, an early stage investor in Instagram and Twitter; Harrison Metal, a seed fund; and Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup and Jonathan Siegel, a venture capitalist specialising in cloud computing. Biggar, who co-founded CircleCI with American Allen Rohner, said Bubba Murarka, a venture capitalist with DFJ, had joined its board post the investment.

"There is just three of us on the board, so we can make decisions fast," he said. Biggar first went to Silicon Valley in 2009 to give a talk to Google and Facebook about his PhD from Trinity College Dublin which made him an expert in developer tools.

He initially tried to launch a media technology start-up after winning a place in Y Combinator, the legendary accelerator where firms such as Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Dropbox began.

This company failed, leading to a blog post by Biggar where he admitted: "Following the launch, everything started going to shit." The Columbia Journalism Review described his frank assessment of how hard it is to build a start-up as "taking a lot of guts".

Afterwards Biggar said he was advised to focus on his expertise as a developer, which led to him co-founding CircleCI. He advised Irish technology entrepreneurs to consider moving to the west coast of the United States.

"It depends on the type of company you are. Where are your customers? If it is developers then it has to be California. My advice is that for Irish start-ups [the State] should consider buying them one-way tickets to San Francisco, " Mr Biggar said.

He said the Intercom model of having its leadership in San Francisco, where many of its clients where, and its developers in Ireland was an admirable one. He said CircleCI had one employee in Dublin but saw its focus remaining in the United States.