CircleCI Acquires Ponicode, Adding AI-powered Testing to Their CI/CD Offering to Ease Daily Life for Software Developers

The move expands the leading CI/CD provider’s global footprint and product capabilities to better support engineering teams as companies increasingly rely on software development

CircleCI, the leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, announced the acquisition of Ponicode, an innovative AI-powered testing platform. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

“The acquisition of Ponicode also opens the ability for CircleCI to hire in France, giving us access to unparalleled talent in the French technology ecosystem.”

CircleCI has been at the forefront of software development since 2011, offering a world-class CI/CD platform to improve developer productivity and increase business outcomes for thousands of customers across the globe.

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Ponicode is a Paris-based startup offering AI-powered testing capabilities, allowing software developers and engineering teams to build defect-free software at scale and with less hassle.

Combining Ponicode’s advanced testing capabilities with CircleCI’s robust CI/CD platform will be transformative for software engineering teams as tasks continue to “shift left,” a growing trend enabling increased software quality and velocity.

According to a 2019 survey from Tidelift and The New Stack, the daily work for a developer is filled with obstacles and inefficiencies, primarily related to everything other than writing code. This problem has only increased for developers, as more organizations look to move work closer to the design and development phase earlier in the process.

“Ponicode’s team of data scientists and software engineers have developed an AI engine to spare software engineers from performing tedious tasks while simultaneously improving technical debt management. Their focus in AI will better help our customers surface intelligence and automation directly to their workflows,” said Jim Rose, CEO, CircleCI. “The acquisition of Ponicode also opens the ability for CircleCI to hire in France, giving us access to unparalleled talent in the French technology ecosystem.”

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As the two companies integrate their offerings, customers will have access to the existing Ponicode IP within CircleCI’s robust CI/CD platform. The combined teams of Ponicode and CircleCI have defined and agreed on a joint roadmap and vision to deliver a series of products in the coming months that intend to:

• Enhance customers’ understanding of their code. The power of Ponicode’s proprietary AI engine and CircleCI’s CI/CD platform will provide developers tools and solutions to write better code, test it, debug it, and resolve issues, based on deep understanding of their code, the ecosystem, and their application running in production.

• Increase software quality, speed, and productivity. Advanced features like test scoring, advanced insights, and automatic code analysis for issue discovery and resolution will find errors or bugs as early in the process as possible to avoid issues later.

“The daily work for a developer is filled with obstacles that keep them from writing code, such as creating tests, debugging issues, responding to production issues, and so on. These problems continue to increase for developers as more and more organizations look to ‘shift left.’ We’re confident that the power of Ponicode’s proprietary AI engine combined with CircleCI’s CI/CD platform will further aid developers to write better code,” said Patrick Joubert, co-founder and CEO, Ponicode.

“The combination of engaging developers in their daily work, combined with a proprietary AI engine that understands their code, creates new opportunities for improved developer velocity when integrated with CircleCI’s CI/CD platform,” said Jim Mercer, Research Director of IDC DevOps and DevSecOps Solutions.

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As CircleCI concludes their FY’22, they reflect on a few notable accomplishments including:

• An increase in market share with developer processing reaching 3 million jobs per day, a $1.7 billion valuation, and a 360 percent three-year CAGR within the $60 billion CI/CD space.
• More than doubling their globally-distributed employee base, bringing total headcount to 650 and growing.
• The availability of the most feature-rich and most generous free tier for CI/CD on the market, along with major product updates including: Test Insights, CircleCI webhooks – deeming it one of the first CI/CD platforms to integrate with Datadog’s new CI Visibility Tool, CircleCI runner, along with added support for Arm.
• Dozens of new partnerships and furthered integrations with popular tools such as AWS, Red Hat, Datadog, Sumo Logic, and others.
• The acquisition of Vamp—the world’s first cloud-native release orchestration platform—to offer first-class release orchestration and change validation to its customers.
• Ranking No. 336 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and being recognized as one of ‘America’s Best Startup Employers’ by Forbes and a ‘Best Tech Work Culture’ Finalist for the 2021 Timmy Awards. CircleCI CEO, Jim Rose, was also named by Constellation Research to its 2022 Business Transformation 150, an elite list of executives leading business transformation efforts around the globe.

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