CircleCI, which makes software to automate building and testing code, raises $31M Series C led by Top Tier Capital Partners
Blair Hanley Frank / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This $31M Series C is the first step in what becomes a steady climb up the funding ladder for CircleCI: it is followed by a $56M Series D in 2019, a $100M Series E during the pandemic-era surge in software delivery demand, and then a $100M round at a $1.7B valuation alongside its acquisition of release-orchestration service Vamp. The 2018 round led by Top Tier Capital Partners is where that trajectory starts.
It also lands in a crowded lane: cloud testing rival Sauce Labs had already banked a $70M round bringing its total past $100M, and AI-driven testing startup Testim raised a $10M Series B the following year — investors were clearly underwriting the same thesis that build-and-test automation becomes core infrastructure.
First-order effects
- CircleCI gains $31M from Top Tier Capital Partners to scale its build-and-test automation platform, extending runway against better-funded rivals like Sauce Labs.
Second-order effects
- Competing test-automation vendors keep raising to match: Sauce Labs' $101M total and Testim's SignalFire-led Series B show the category turning into a funded arms race rather than a niche.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds through CircleCI's later Vamp acquisition, pointing toward CI/CD vendors consolidating from single-purpose build tools into broader release-orchestration platforms competing on scope, not just price.
The trend: Continuous integration and delivery tooling is drawing progressively larger venture rounds as software teams treat automated build-test-deploy pipelines as essential infrastructure.