We last wrote about Codeship last year when the startup, which was founded in Vienna and then based in Berlin, crossed the Atlantic to set up shop in the US, armed with seed money from Seedcamp. The B2D platform, which makes releasing software easier and shortens development cycles, had just graduated from the hub:raum accelerator here in the German capital and was looking to expand beyond Ruby on Rails into other technology stacks.
And things seem to have gone well in the past year-and-a-bit. The startup has announced a Series A investment worth $2.6 million (€1.9m) led by Sigma Prime Ventures (whose partner John Simon will join the Codeship board) and also including Boston Seed Capital and Devonshire Investors, as well as a few angels.
The new Codeship HQ is being built in Boston – one of the East Coast’s best startup hubs – after the team considered but ultimately rejected following the well-trodden path to Silicon Valley, according to co-founder and CEO Moritz Plassnig.
That decision was taken largely because it was much easier to find talent in Boston, Plassnig added, with the company looking to expand its team of six to a total of 13 in both Boston and Vienna. He told Silicon Allee: “Boston is in general a pretty cool city with a higher living-quality compared to San Francisco. It’s easier to hire people quickly here. We’ll be in San Francisco regularly but we don’t have to have the whole team there 24/7.”
The company, which was formerly called Railsonfire and was founded by Plassnig, Florian Motlik and Manuel Weiss, also went through acceleration programs at Seedcamp and Techstars.
In an effort to meet the increasing need to release often and quickly, Codeship automates much of the process between services like GitHub, where source code is stored, and Heroku, where the application is running. The platform, which charges a monthly fee, also provides a testing environment – one of the few parts of the software development cycle which is largely still done locally and not in the cloud.