There’s a problem out there in Developer Land in that developers of apps in iOS, Android and other platforms have to manually set up every step for their application. It means they can easily customize things, but that then creates more maintenance costs. The ideal solution would be the automation of all the mobile building, testing and deployment, allowing developers the ability to concentrate on actually building something.
That’s effectively the claim of Bitrise. This former Y Combinator startup describes itself as a “mobile continuous integration and delivery (CI/ CD) platform for app developers.” Its now raised a Series A funding round worth $3.2 million (£2.5 million).
The funding round was led by OpenOcean, with participation from Y Combinator, Fiedler Capital and other angel investors.
The first Hungarian startup to get into YC, Bitrise will expand the team in that country and also expand their US office. They plan to improve the whole developer integration library, with new add ons like user analytics and reporting, as well as rolling out an enterprise support solution.
Bitrise is currently used by Foursquare, Fox, InVision and Grindr, alongside more than 20,000 developers across the world, with the main user base in the US and UK, and a growing presence in Japan. It also has a strong open source community on top of its core product, which helps.
On the investment, Richard Muirhead, General Partner at OpenOcean says: “Bitrise gets to the heart of some of the core challenges for mobile app developers. Bringing this level of automation to the development process, while being open source means that developers are able to focus on innovation as opposed to manual tasks.”
Y Combinator Partner, Jared Friedman, says: “Bitrise is the most open platform in the space. It’s completely extensible and lets developers use all the third party services they know and love in one beautiful interface.”
Bitrise was co-founded by Barnabas Birmacher, Daniel Balla and Viktor Benei in October 2014.
CEO Birmacher says other platforms “approach the problem with the same mindset as their web product and provide a platform where developers have to manually set up every step for their application. This gives them high customizability, but makes them face huge maintenance costs. [Others] created an easy solution where they automatically set everything up for you, but from the initial setup the customizability is really limited and everything works as a black box.”
Competitors include CircleCI, Travis, Nevercode and Buddybuild.