Avi Cavale of Shippable was last year's GeekWire ping pong champ
Avi Cavale of Shippable was the 2014 GeekWire ping pong champ

Shippable founder Avi Cavale wasn’t looking for cash.

But investors just kept calling, especially after they learned how quickly the company’s user base was growing.

Those calls have resulted in new cash, with Shippable announcing today that it has raised $8 million in series A funding. Backers of the Seattle startup include Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures, Vulcan Capital and Founder’s Co-op. Total funding in Shippable, a TechStars Seattle grad, now stands at $10.1 million.

Shippable helps teams more easily ship code, helping them do so more quickly and efficiently. The company says it can reduce an organization’s development and test lab footprint by 70 percent, improving application development quality along the way. It competes with Travis CI and Circle CI, with plans to expand more aggressively into the enterprise arena.

At this time, Cavale said about 1,600 businesses are using its tools. The service runs on Amazon Web Services, and is built on Docker.

Cavale said his company’s hosted service removes the need for utilizing virtual machines in the development environment, creating an “automatic pipeline between GitHub and whatever cloud provider you want to use.”

“We use containers to remove the need for VMs,” said Cavale, a former Microsoft manager in the Azure group. “Containers provide a tremendous advantage because the spin-up time for a container is less 10 or 15 seconds. A spin-up time for a VM is 15 to 20 minutes, so what you get is a faster build time, as well as a cheaper infrastructure for your bills because you are no longer spinning all of those VMs.”

He said developers typically keep those virtual machines running all of time, since it takes so long to spin them up. As a result, that costs a lot of money.

“The phrase ‘continuous integration’ is a misnomer. Traditional CI tools like Jenkins only help automate unit tests, and functional testing on staging environments is still predominantly manual and not really ‘continuous.’ We have created a modern CI platform that automates the entire delivery pipeline and makes fast and agile releases possible for all enterprises,” said Cavale in a statement.

As part of the financing, Tim Porter of Madrona has joined the company’s board.

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