Shippable

Market position

Shippable competed in the continuous integration and delivery tools market against CircleCI, CloudBees, Perforce, Atlassian, Codeship and the open-source Jenkins tool. It differentiated on speed and simplicity derived from containers; a Codeship co-founder disputed the claim, arguing his company also avoided VMs and saw no speed advantage for Shippable. JFrog's leadership characterized Shippable's technology as a next-generation CI/CD fit for its enterprise platform strategy, in a market where buyers increasingly sought end-to-end DevOps solutions.

The company's stated advantages were container-based builds with persistent state that avoid repeated environment setup, test environments that are replicas of production containers, deployment flexibility across customer data centers and public clouds, and a combination of enterprise experience with open-source agility. Management also argued that traditional CI tools such as Jenkins automated only unit tests, leaving functional testing on staging environments largely manual.

Technology

The platform used Docker Linux containers rather than virtual machines to run builds and unit tests. Shippable originally implemented its own Linux container before adopting Docker, whose open-sourced LXC management layer unified the handling of heterogeneous application environments; the CEO said this replaced work that had required 15 developers and over a year. The company said its containers preserve persistent state between builds, so dependency installation such as gems, packages, services and git clone need not be repeated on each run, in contrast to VM-based competitors that reset environments. Because build containers replicate production containers, development, test and production environments align. Reported drawbacks included Docker's distinct security requirements, which demand familiarity with the Linux container environment compared with the isolation layer a hypervisor provides.

Go-to-market

Early exposure came through the Techstars Seattle accelerator, Demo Day and local startup events, together with developer-focused positioning around speed and simplicity. Series A proceeds were earmarked for moving upmarket into enterprises, and post-acquisition distribution shifted to JFrog's enterprise platform and customer base.

Software development teams and DevOps organizations, ranging from individual developers and open-source repositories to enterprises adopting continuous integration, which the company said were only beginning to do so at the time of its Series A.

Geography

Shippable operated from the Seattle area as a Techstars Seattle alumnus; after acquisition its technology was integrated into the platform of JFrog, an Israel-founded DevOps vendor.

History

Shippable took part in the Techstars Seattle 2013 class, appearing at Demo Day in October 2013 with roughly eight employees and about 1,000 builds a day. In December 2013 it announced a $2.05 million syndicated seed round for its Docker-based CI service. It launched version 2.0 of the platform in early September 2014 and, in November 2014, raised an $8 million Series A led by Madrona Venture Group to accelerate an enterprise push. Reported cumulative funding was $10.1 million. The company was subsequently acquired by JFrog, an event customers were discussing on its GitHub support tracker by April 2019, when they noted an apparent slowdown in product development and support.

Risks & controversies

Coverage noted that Docker's security model imposes requirements that require Linux container expertise and lacks the additional isolation layer of a hypervisor, described as a potential hindrance. A competitor publicly disputed Shippable's speed claims. After the JFrog acquisition, users on the company's support tracker raised concerns that product development and support had slowed, creating uncertainty for prospective adopters.