US web firm co-founded by Dubliner raises $6m

CircleCI, a San Francisco start-up co-founded by 32-year-old Dubliner Paul Biggar, has raised $6 million (€4.4 million) from venture capital firm DFJ.

Founded in 2011, CircleCI already has revenues of $1 million a year, as 1,000 web developer customers use its cloud-based product to code more efficiently, a process called continuous integration (CI).

Mr Biggar told The Irish Times: "For developers we help automate workflow and ensure software works better."

The Trinity College Dublin PhD holder co-founded CircleCI with fellow coder Allen Rohner after both men realised they were working towards the same goals. The investment from DFJ, which has invested $7 billion since its foundation in companies like Skype and Hotmail, adds to CircleCI's investor base.

Early-stage investor
In 2011 CircleCI raised $1.5 million from Baseline Ventures, an early-stage investor in Twitter and Instagram, as well as Harrison Metal, a seed fund backed by Michael Dearing.

Its angel investors include Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup, and Jonathan Siegel, a venture capitalist who specialises in cloud companies.

“It wasn’t expected we would do a fundraising round like this,” Mr Biggar said.

“It will allow us focus on product. We haven’t done marketing or sales – it has just been word of mouth among developers about the product.”

Bubba Murarka, who led the investment for DFJ, will join CircleCI's board. In a statement Murarka, a former senior Facebook executive, said: "The market has welcomed CircleCI, and the demand for these tools is reflected in the durable traction the company achieved prior to funding, having grown over 25 times since their initial seed round."

Mr Biggar went to Silicon Valley first in 2009 to give a talk to Google and Facebook about his research. "I slept in a hacker house and heard about Y Combinator. (the legendary start-up accelerator that has supported firms like Airbnb and Dropbox). I really loved the atmosphere and decided to apply."

First start-ups
Biggar's first start-ups, called Newslabs.com and Newstilt.com, aimed to help the newspaper business adapt to the internet.

He created software to help media companies manage communities of commentators but the business didn’t get traction.

“Newspapers saw comments as a cost (as they had to be moderated) rather than a benefit (driving traffic and building loyalty),” he said. He then worked on trying to build a way for journalists to launch their businesses built around a single personality, but this too didn’t take off.

Biggar then worked for Mozilla, the free software community best known for creating the Firefox web browser, initially in Dublin before returning to San Francisco to work for it.

While working for Mozilla he saw the gap in the market that CircleCI has solved.