Depot Raises $10M Series A to Rebuild CI for the AI Era
Depot, the build acceleration platform for software teams, has raised a $10M Series A from Felicis, Y Combinator, and Pioneer Fund. The company previously raised a $4.1M seed round from Felicis and Pioneer Fund during the YC W23 batch.
Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie founded Depot after experiencing the pain of slow Docker image builds firsthand. The company has since grown from a Docker image build tool into a broader platform spanning GitHub Actions runners, remote caching, and local builds.
Now the company is taking on CI itself. Depot makes builds up to 40x faster for Docker containers and GitHub Actions, but the founders argue that existing CI systems like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Buildkite were designed for a world where humans write code at a human pace. With AI coding tools generating commits at a dramatically higher velocity, those systems are becoming a bottleneck. As Galbraith put it in the announcement: "The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to integrating it."
The funding will go toward the launch of Depot CI, a new CI engine the company built from scratch with performance as a first-class concern. It's compatible with GitHub Actions workflows but designed to handle the throughput that AI-assisted development teams now demand. Depot CI supports both engineers working at a terminal and agents running autonomously.
The round marks a milestone for Pioneer Fund as well. "This was the first time we co-led a Series A at Pioneer Fund," said Tim Suzman, Managing Partner at Pioneer Fund. "Depot started out solving one problem really well, but we could see their ambition and scope growing. The faster people can code, the more important it becomes to unblock the rest of the DevTech stack."
Zach Waterfield, Investment Partner at Pioneer Fund, has used Depot both as a team lead at PostHog and now as CTO at a seed-stage startup.
"Depot has been incredible for our team. Integration was straightforward, and we saw immediate performance gains across our Docker builds and CI runners with almost no overhead. After the results we've seen so far, we're now testing their full CI and are really excited about what it unlocks."
Galbraith wrote that the company's longer-term vision extends beyond CI into a full software delivery platform covering source control, builds, and validation. Teams interested in Depot CI can join the waitlist on the company's site.