Insight invests $172m in Australia's Octopus Deploy

This is Octopus' first outside investment in an eight-year period of strong organic growth. The company was set up in 2011 by Paul Stovell and his wife Sonia and achieved profitability the following year. It now employs about 100 staff and serves 25,000 organizations, including NASA, Disney, Microsoft, and Xero.

"We routinely talk to our portfolio companies about the products they use or that their customers are using and Octopus Deploy came up over and over," Michael Triplett, a managing director at Insight, said in a statement. "The company has flown under the radar, but when you talk to their customers, they are huge fans. It is clear to us that Octopus is the leader in enterprise deployment automation."

Octopus' core offering is a platform that allows IT teams to more efficiently manage software development, release, installation, updating, testing, and deployment. These procedures are variously classified as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).

"Most software teams can set up a CI server rather easily, but many of them struggle to achieve full CD, because deployments were - and still are - the hardest part of software delivery pipelines," Paul Stovell said.

Insight said that it would bring the "full force" of its operations specialists to help Octopus in the next stage of its growth. To date, the company has pursued a product-led growth model focused on networking within the software development community. The staff is therefore heavily weighted toward engineering, product, and support.

Since its inception, Octopus has embraced a remote-first work culture, with staff encouraged to organize their work to maximize their personal productivity. However, forward growth plans will include the opening of the company's first large office in Brisbane. Most employees are currently in Australia, and there are small teams in the US and UK.

"[A]s an R&D-centric company, enterprise go-to-market didn't come particularly naturally to us, so traction to date has been organic," Paul Stovell added. "As we got to know Insight Partners, it was clear that they will be a great help as we grow and scale our sales and enterprise go-to-market."

New York-based Insight has invested in more than 400 technology and software companies globally since 1995. During this time, the firm has received more than $30 billion in commitments for various private equity and venture capital funds. Australian activity includes participation in a $45 million round for Linktree, a social media services platform that drives audience engagement.

Recent global interest in Australia's CI and CD software deployment services niche includes US-based VCs Global Catalyst and OpenView investing about $20 million in Buildkite at a valuation of around $144 million. Like Octopus, Buildkite had achieved sustainable growth and profitability independently but required outside support for its next stage of scaling.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Technology
• Expansion
• Australia
• enterprise software