B2D Service Railsonfire Rebrands as Codeship and Sets Sail for the US

By David Knight |

Railsonfire has been hard at work rebranding itself as Codeship – and now the Berlin-based startup is ready to set sail for the US. The B2D (business to developer) platform is expanding beyond Ruby on Rails to embrace different technology stacks and has also announced an investment from Seedcamp.

The Codeship team – who founded the project in Vienna in 2011 – have recently been part of the hub:raum acclerator in the German capital. The aim of the updated platform is to make developers’ lives easier while helping them to ship their product.

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.

And now the platform offers support for Go, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python as well as Ruby on Rails, with more set to be added.

Railsonfire was started by three co-founders as a side project. Once they saw that it had legs, they attended Mini Seedcamp Budapest before arriving in Berlin last November.

And now there are big plans to cross the Atlantic, according to CEO Moritz Plassnig. He told Silicon Allee: “In the long run, we have to go to the US or have at least a permanent presence there. Every B2D product, every tool for software developers which became huge is from the US or at least based there… We want to tackle the enterprise market at the end of 2013 and therefore, the market in the US is definitely bigger.”

Moritz also identified a pattern amongst successful American B2D startups. He added: “All of them became the default choice for a specific problem, like GitHub and Heroku. They achieved this in the US first and then everyone just followed.”