CircleCI, Inc.
CircleCI's mission is to keep engineering teams on top of it all, so they can deliver great products and enjoy the process. They build CI/CD tooling to keep the world's best engineers shipping great code, enabling teams to automate their entire software delivery pipeline with speed, focus, and control.
Founding Story
CircleCI was founded in September 2011 in San Francisco by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner to address inefficiencies in software deployment. The platform was designed to be 'Heroku for testing' by offering easy GitHub integration and YAML-based configuration files. Biggar brought expertise from his PhD in compilers and static analysis, as well as prior work on Mozilla's JavaScript engine. The company released its beta in October 2011 and raised $50k from a small investor a few months after starting.
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Leadership
Founders
Paul Biggar
Paul Biggar served as founding CEO until 2015. He holds a degree in computer science and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin focusing on software compilers and static analysis. He previously worked at Demonware (games tech firm), worked on Mozilla's JavaScript engine, and founded News Labs (Y Combinator). He later founded Darklang and Tech for Palestine. He remained on CircleCI's board until December 2023.
Allen Rohner
Allen Rohner is co-founder and served as CTO. He has a machine learning background and is a Clojure contributor. He holds a degree from Southern Methodist University. He is a three-time entrepreneur who previously worked at Crossroads Systems for 4 years. After CircleCI, he co-founded Griffin, a UK-based banking platform, where he serves as CTO.
Executive Team
Jim Rose
Chief Executive Officer
Joined CircleCI in 2014 through the acquisition of Distiller, where he was a founder. Led the company's growth to over $100M in revenue.
Rob Zuber
Chief Technology Officer
Joined CircleCI in 2014 through the acquisition of Distiller, where he was a founder. Instrumental in building CircleCI's technical platform and product strategy.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Credit-based usage pricing model. Credits are purchased up-front and used to pay for CircleCI platform usage in real-time, including monthly active users, compute time based on resource classes, and add-on features. Also offers subscription-based plans (Free, Performance, Scale) with different credit allocations and feature sets.
Pricing Tiers
30,000 free credits/month (6,000 build minutes with small Docker). Up to 5 active users/month, 30x concurrency, Docker/Windows/Linux/Arm/macOS support, self-hosted runners, 1 GB network, 2 GB storage, community support.
$15 for every 25,000 credits. 30,000 free credits included. 5 active users included ($15/month per additional user), larger resources, 80x concurrency, optional 8x5 support, 5 GB network, 2 GB storage, 20 self-hosted runner concurrent tasks, unlimited flaky test detection.
Customizable plans with enterprise controls, largest resource classes including GPU, optional 24/7 support, custom users and concurrency, 50 GB network, 200 GB storage, unlimited self-hosted runner tasks, SSO, config policies.
Target Markets
- Enterprise software development teams
- Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB)
- Startups
- Open source projects
- Platform engineering teams
- DevOps teams
- Continuous integration (CI)
- Continuous delivery (CD)
- Automated testing and test orchestration
- Mobile app development (iOS, Android)
- AI and machine learning workflows
- Release orchestration and deployment management
- Meta
- Nextdoor
- Adobe
History & Milestones
Launched Chunk AI agent in beta for autonomous validation
Published 2025 State of Software Delivery Report based on 15 million workflows
Launched Release Agent to automate release orchestration
Issued public security alert regarding infostealer malware incident
Acquired Ponicode, an AI-driven code analysis tool
1 AI Tool by CircleCI, Inc.
CircleCI
9moCI/CD platform with specialized capabilities for accelerating AI/ML workflows and software delivery.
