Behind the Investment: Incredibuild – Turbocharging Software Release Cycles

There is an old cartoon in which two programmers sword fight next to their computers. When their boss tells them to get back to work, they respond, “My code is compiling.” The boss relinquishes – “Carry on then!”

Code compilation, or the process of converting written programming language into machine readable code, can take up hours of developers’ time while they simply wait for the compilation to finish. It sounds archaic for today’s standards where most companies with a digital presence have a highly orchestrated set of developer tools and processes, timed down to the minute to maximize software release cycles. Considering the premium that companies pay to retain top developers, the notion of these developers sitting idle while their code compiles feels like a poor utilization of their talent, not to mention the company’s resources.

This is where Incredibuild comes in. Built to save developers’ time, Incredibuild utilizes idle computing power in a network (both on premise and in the cloud) to run parallel processes. By enabling distributed processing of the workload, Incredibuild can speed up code compilation, as well as unit testing, release automation, and graphic rendering. Developers can cut down on the hours of “sword fighting,” ultimately empowering their teams to ship more software versions. Incredibuild also allows customers to utilize their compute as efficiently as possible, thereby cutting down on compute costs.  

At Insight, we like to focus on building long term relationships; Incredibuild is a case in point. Insight first met Incredibuild in 2003, when the company was in its first year of operations. Over the last 18 years, we continued to connect with the team, following along as they spent those first 15 years bootstrapped and meticulously focused on product. Customer acquisition was almost entirely organic, and their product-led founding team was able to grow and retain its customer base despite little investment in go-to-market or customer success.  In 2018, Fortissimo Capital acquired the company and brought on an all-star CEO, Tami Shachar, to help build off the already solid foundation. From our first conversation with Tami, we could tell Incredibuild had struck gold by bringing in a thoughtful and experienced operator who was laser-focused on leveling up the company across marketing, sales, and customer support teams. We spent the better part of a year observing Tami and her team’s leadership translate into commercial acceleration and operational readiness. After almost 20 years of tracking the company, we seized our opportunity to invest.

We knew we wanted to partner with Incredibuild in this next phase of growth for three main reasons. First and foremost, Insight wants to invest in companies with strong products that delight their customers. Every customer we spoke to cited Incredibuild’s easy implementation, saved developer time, and lower compute costs. At Insight, we see best-in-class products yield a Net Promoter Score of +50%, and in this case, Incredibuild’s was 81%. Customers love the product.

Second, while the most common use of Incredibuild’s product is for build acceleration, their core technology can work for numerous use cases, including unit testing, graphics rendering, and release automation. By serving other computationally intensive workloads with long wait times, Incredibuild can add value to almost any industry or type of customer.  The team continues to probe its manifold applications by investing heavily in product development, recently launching support across multiple operating systems and programming languages. By delivering on more product use cases, they are rapidly broadening their market addressability.

Lastly, today’s market needs a solution like Incredibuild. As more companies move to the cloud, the expectation for high quality, frequent software releases has increased. Companies need to improve their time to market in order to maintain a competitive edge. Further cloud adoption will continue to turbocharge these software development cycles, thus making Incredibuild a must-have tool.

We are thrilled to announce our $140M investment into Incredibuild and look forward to continuing to support the team for years to come.