Behind the Investment: Octopus Deploy – Making Complex Software Deployments Easy
As the software ecosystem continues to grow, the market demands better, faster, and more frequent software releases. Once code is written, compiled, and tested, it then has to get deployed into production. This is where things typically break down – traditionally, deployment has been a manual and complex process, and oftentimes the most challenging and fragile part of the software development pipeline.
Octopus Deploy tackles these challenges and this complexity head-on. Octopus is the leading software deployment automation platform, purpose-built to automate DevOps workflows across development frameworks and deployment targets. Octopus first enables developers to easily and automatically deploy to target machines both on-prem and in the cloud, and ensures that all deployments are correct and consistent between environments. From there, Octopus closes the gap between deployments and operations with runbook automation, enabling teams to define, manage, and execute runbooks in a productized way to keep software running smoothly. Octopus supports frameworks from .NET to JVM, and workloads from VMs to containers, meeting devs where they already work today.
Husband-and-wife team Paul and Sonia Stovell started Octopus as a “nights and weekends” project in 2011. One year later they went all in, and they have now built the leading deployment automation solution for global enterprises. Octopus was bootstrapped until Insight invested $172.5M for a minority stake this year. The Octopus team continually invested all of its profits back into the company, fueling both product innovation and sales, leading to gaining many Fortune 500 customers.
The Insight team began building a relationship with Octopus more than 5 years ago. Paul and Sonia never wanted to raise capital, but we knew we had found one of the most widely used and loved developer tools out there. We kept in touch and were always excited to hear the Octopus update: new product launches, new enterprise wins, and always continued excitement about the opportunity ahead. We also began speaking to our portfolio companies and other players in the software ecosystem, and the feedback was consistent: Octopus powered the last phase of their software development pipelines, and they could not build products without it.
In late 2020, Paul and Sonia began to think about the next phase of Octopus’ growth. They realized they had established themselves as the leading deployment plugin on both the Azure DevOps and TeamCity marketplaces, amassed thousands of paying customers across big enterprise logos like Microsoft, NASA, Disney, ASOS, and Xero, all by exclusively focusing on creating a product that users loved. But, significant opportunity was still out there, and it was time to supercharge growth.
Insight is particularly excited about Octopus for three main reasons:
- Octopus sells into one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets: software development tools. Octopus can be used by the 25 million developers worldwide, and as more organizations demand more software and faster releases, Octopus can help meet that requirement.
- Octopus is created for developers, by developers. They have won the hearts and minds of their users, and they will be able to capture even more developer mindshare with new products as they continue to build out the platform.
- Octopus’ growth has been driven by 100% organic, bottoms-up adoption to date. Insight will bring its ScaleUp expertise and help build a world-class sales and marketing organization to accelerate Octopus’ reach. The market is there, the product addresses an acute need, and word simply needs to get out: Octopus will fix your software team’s deployment challenges and automate a process that today is manual and complex.
We are thrilled to partner with Paul and Sonia and the entire Octopus team. They are thoughtful, genuine, and brilliant, and we could not be more excited to welcome them to the Insight portfolio.
