DEVOPSdigest

Launchable closed a $9.5 million Series A investment led by 645 Ventures, Battery Ventures, Unusual Ventures, GoingVC, and angel investors.

The funding will be used to deliver on its vision of Continuous Quality for developers to deliver faster software releases.

"Our vision is to help teams and developers deliver software quickly and confidently, with data-driven insights and actions. Historically, slow software build & test problems have been 'solved' by brute force, by throwing more computers and humans at the problem," said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, co-CEO and co-Founder, Launchable and creator of Jenkins. "Many teams are now hitting the limit of that. With software becoming bigger and the demand stronger, with more automation, Launchable is able to help developers and teams intelligently solve this problem. Test what matters and find issues faster, reduce risk, increase commit frequency, and decrease time-to-production."

Typical software projects require long-running test suites that run all tests each time they are run, proving to be wasteful when developers are working on a minor change in a large project. There is no easy way to know the precise tests to run when only a few are relevant.

The core of the Launchable platform is a machine learning intelligence that predicts the likelihood of failure for each test based on past runs and the source code changes under test. Every time tests run, the results are passed to Launchable to continuously train the model, and on the next test run the platform predicts which subset of all tests to test based on code changes coming in. Launchable solves infrastructure costs and productivity issues by identifying and running the appropriate tests in each run, thereby reducing test run times without sacrificing quality. The platform can also use this data to identify and score the most flaky tests in the test suites.

Launchable was founded by Kawaguchi, and Harpreet Singh, VP Product at Cloudbees and Head of Product for Bitbucket at Atlassian. Famous for creating Jenkins, Kawaguchi is passionate about solving problems developers face every day. As CTO of CloudBees, he worked with Singh to create the Jenkins business and grew the team to over 400 people. Singh helped create the Jenkins business that scaled to multi-millions in ARR. Launchable was launched in September 2019.

"As early seed investors in Launchable, we've been heartened to see the progress the company has made, particularly during the pandemic, as many organizations accelerated digital-transformation efforts and saw first-hand the importance of improving software-development processes," said Dharmesh Thakker, a Battery Ventures general partner. Added Chiraag Deora, a Battery VP: "Many companies continue to struggle to deliver quality software fast, so we're pleased to continue to back Launchable as it helps dev teams eliminate the testing bottleneck."

Additional investors include GoingVC and Al Zollar, Siris Capital Group, Executive Advisor. Previously, Launchable raised $3.2M in seed funding from investors including Sri Viswanath, CTO Atlassian, Noah Wasmer, Head of Technical Teams, Atlassian, Sacha Labourey, Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer at CloudBees, Masaru Tange, Founder, SHIFT, Inc., Koki Uchiyama, Founder, Hottolink, Inc., Jagmeet Lamba, Founder and CEO, Certa, and Bob Bickel, CEO RunSignup.