Depot

Market position

Depot positions itself as a faster, cheaper alternative to default CI compute — principally GitHub-hosted Actions runners and standard Docker builds on generic CI providers — competing on build speed, cache throughput, cost and observability rather than on breadth of DevOps tooling. It is an early-stage, venture-backed developer-infrastructure company with a small team relative to the incumbents it targets, and has been extending from build acceleration toward a full CI, source-control and sandbox platform.

Drop-in compatibility (replacing `docker build` with `depot build`, or swapping the GitHub Actions `runs-on` label) combined with persistent distributed caching shared across a team and local development; emulation-free native Arm and Intel builds; per-second billing and unrestricted concurrency; observability features such as build/CI metrics, logs, test results, failure fingerprints and Datadog CI Visibility integration; and the option to run the data plane inside the customer's own AWS account.

Technology

Depot runs builds and CI jobs on performance-tuned cloud compute, largely AWS EC2 (m7a instances cited as ~30% more performant than alternatives, Graviton for Arm), with a dedicated instance launched per job and terminated afterwards, public IPv4 per instance to avoid shared rate limits, and networking up to 1.5 GB/s. A distributed cache cluster backed by S3 and Ceph provides persistent Docker layer cache and CI cache without GitHub's 10 GB per-repo limit. The CI engine uses microVMs that boot in under a second, durable checkpoint replay, snapshotting, parallel step execution and SSH debugging; engineering posts describe a custom device-mapper control plane replacing LVM for faster block-device assembly, TLA+ formal verification of the registry garbage collector, SOCI v2 seekable-image index generation at build time, and durable Lambda functions with distributed tracing. Interfaces include a CLI, gRPC/Connect/HTTP-JSON APIs and a TypeScript Sandbox SDK.

Go-to-market

Bottom-up, developer-led distribution: free trial without credit card, drop-in replacements for existing commands and workflow labels (changing `docker build` to `depot build`, or the `runs-on` label), extensive documentation and integrations with CI providers, infrastructure-as-code and compute platforms, plus a technical blog, developer-community and events staffing, and Y Combinator launch posts. The team also includes solutions engineering, enterprise support and a VP of Revenue, indicating a sales-assisted motion for larger accounts. Distribution partnerships include the Stripe Projects developer preview and an app in Origin code hosting.

Software engineering teams and DevOps organizations that run container builds and CI pipelines, from individual developers to fast-growing technology companies and enterprise accounts; also platform companies that need to build container images on behalf of their own users. Publicly cited customers include PostHog, Wistia, Semgrep, Appsmith, Secoda and PlanetScale.

Geography

Sources give conflicting location data: Startup Intros lists an HQ in Atlanta, GA while its narrative text says the company is based in Portland, Oregon. The founders are distributed internationally — Kyle Galbraith relocated from Portland, Oregon to Montpellier, France in October 2022, and Jacob Gillespie is a US expat living in the UK. Compute infrastructure for GitHub Actions runners is hosted in AWS us-east-1.

History

Depot was incorporated in January 2022 by Kyle Galbraith (CEO) and Jacob Gillespie (CTO). A private beta launched in May 2022 and a public launch followed in July 2022. The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch (partner Nicolas Dessaigne). A seed round of about $2M is recorded for July 2023, a $4.1M seed round closed in August 2024, and a $10M Series A was announced in March 2026. Product scope expanded from container builds to managed GitHub Actions runners, Depot Cache, Depot Registry, the Build API, Depot CI, Sandboxes, Depot Metal and Depot Code.

Risks & controversies

No controversies are reported in the sources. Notable data caveats: third-party aggregator figures conflict with company sources (total funding of $16.0M across three rounds versus the internal $10M disclosed figure; headquarters listed as both Atlanta and Portland; team size of 8 versus about twenty named staff on the company's about page). The business depends heavily on the GitHub Actions ecosystem and on AWS as its compute provider, and company blog posts explicitly frame GitHub as "the wrong shape" for current workflows while the product is simultaneously built around GitHub Actions compatibility.