Wercker Announces Seed Funding

By Micha Hernandez van Leuffen

Wednesday, Jan 23 2013

SAN FRANCISCO and AMSTERDAM – January 23, 2013 – Wercker, a cloud-based continuous delivery platform for cloud software development, announced today that the company has raised an undisclosed seed funding round led by Shamrock Ventures, with additional funding from Greylock Partners and Amsterdam-based micro VC Vitulum Ventures. Wercker provides a continuous cloud delivery platform that democratizes continuous delivery and increases developer velocity, empowering companies to push updates to their apps at a continuous and rapid pace. Wercker will leverage the new funds to scale its platform and operations to reach more developers worldwide, thus improving the collaboration of developer teams by making the art and science of software delivery more democratic, social, and open.

Software is eating the world

“Our team and investing partners see Wercker as an innovative leap for cloud developers, making developer teams social and open, and helping to radically accelerate developer productivity,” said Dan Harple, Managing Director of Shamrock Ventures.

Software is taking over the world, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the preferred delivery model. This sentiment has become widely accepted throughout the tech community, most notably examined in depth by Marc Andreessen. Developer effectiveness will become both the limiting factor and the competitive advantage for every industry as software becomes universally relevant. Updates to cloud-based software can now be pushed out incrementally, and continuous delivery and developer velocity are the key enablers.

Wercker: the continuous deployment SaaS platform Wercker’s continuous delivery SaaS platform fills a huge gap in today’s software landscape where developers rely on cloud services like GitHub to store and version their code, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) applications to deploy it. What’s been missing up to this point is a continuous deployment SaaS solution like Wercker that democratizes continuous delivery, increases developer velocity, and keeps updates flowing. Wercker also integrates a social networking element to the process so that developer team members can see what their colleagues are doing or have done. The social element reveals who broke (or fixed) what, and involves a high degree of transparency. This is especially important given that development teams are increasingly global and geographically dispersed, and already rely on other cloud-based tools to keep work updated and to track versions. Wercker is currently running in private beta, however interested parties can request a beta invite to gain early access to the Wercker platform at http://beta.wercker.com. A video explanation of Wercker is available at http://vimeo.com/53756616.

“Wercker continues to grow from strength to strength, and we’re delighted to have such an experienced and respected group of investors,” said Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, CEO and founder of Wercker. “We are also pleased to announce our new advisory board consisting of Dan Harple, Managing Director of Shamrock Ventures and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at MIT, Jan Pieter Scheerder, former President of SunSoft, and Arthur van Hoff, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint and former CTO of Flipboard. All of this synergy will help us build the integral platform for how software is delivered globally to the cloud.”

Wercker was part of the 2012 Rockstart Accelerator startup incubator program based in Amsterdam, and most recently participated in Mozilla’s WebFWD program. NexusLabs, a foundation based in Amsterdam and Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT that fosters innovation, supported Wercker in preparing its pitch, fine tuning its business plans, preparing its management, and in bringing leading U.S. venture capital parties to the table. Wercker also recently won the GigaOM Structure:Europe Launchpad competition, taking home both the People’s Choice and Judge’s awards.

Wercker presents today in San Francisco at the Mozilla WebFWD Demoday, Mozilla’s premier accelerator program focused on open innovation.