CloudBees acquires Launchable to bring AI-powered insights
Offers AI-augmented QA to CI and QA tools including Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Selenium and others
Key Takeaways
Let’s get the news out of the way. CloudBees has acquired Launchable and will offer it as part of its suite of offerings.
I have written plenty of blogs, but I must say that there are no ready-made templates for capturing the emotions that a founder experiences when their company is acquired. A company acquisition is likely a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and as you reflect, you realize that plenty of stakeholders have made this successful. Thus, I wrote this blog in the following style: “What does the acquisition mean to X?” where X = stakeholder.
If you don’t know about Launchable, here is a quick bite that makes the rest of the blog understandable
The problem
Development teams spend at least a quarter of their time testing and fixing errors in their code, and even still, the majority of AI solutions on the market today are focused on generating code. Unnecessary testing, lengthy test execution times, unreliable test results, and the overwhelming task of root-cause analysis for test failures are among the primary roadblocks. These issues slow down the development cycle, increase costs, and frustrate teams striving to deliver high-quality software. This inefficiency underscores the urgent need for intelligent solutions that streamline testing processes without compromising quality.
The Launchable Solution
Launchable brings a transformative approach to software testing through AI-powered insights that optimize testing workflows. By leveraging machine learning, Launchable intelligently selects and prioritizes the most important tests with the highest potential impact, significantly reducing test cycles and improving the accuracy of test results. Launchable speeds up testing removes manual overhead and allows teams to ship faster. Early customers of Launchable’s “intelligent triaging” via GenAI saw numerous benefits in time and hard cost savings: 50% reduction in machine hours, 90% reduction in test execution times, and 40% reduction in build times.
What Launchable’s acquisition means for…
The DevOps and QA market: Evolution to AI-augmented DevOps and QA
Over the years, DevOps has helped people move from releasing software as a craft to releasing it at scale. We are now entering the next phase, where customers ask, “How can we be smart about releasing software?” and AI is helping them answer this question.
When we raised funds in 2019 for Launchable, we laid out our hypothesis in the following slide. We fundamentally believed that moving up the y-axis was the natural thing to do. Seeing that the market has evolved to this viewpoint gives me immense pleasure.
Test Frameworks: A mix of GenAI and ML can dramatically improve QA workflows
Launchable chose to address quality/tests because we observed customers struggling with QA, which slowed down customers. We became the early voice and eventually thought leaders in the AI-augmented QA space.
The QA space is thriving and dynamic, with over a hundred frameworks and vendors. The Launchable approach to improving quality is test-framework and language-agnostic; thus, we can help all types of organizations.
A DevOps pipeline is a series of test suites wired by Jenkins or other CI vendors. CloudBees can now help customers with their quality cycles.
CloudBees—customers and the team
CloudBees has been a lighthouse in the DevOps market. When we started talking to them about our synergies, we were quite taken by how they had thought about this space, the overlap in our vision, and their emphasis on solving customer problems.
Over the years, CloudBees has been relentless in helping its customers drive out the inefficiencies in the development cycles to help teams iterate faster. Now, with Launchable, they can slash QA cycles to deliver on their mission.
Thus, CloudBees is immediately introducing the Launchable solution to its customer base.
The CloudBees team is excited to have Launchable over because we know each other…more later.
Jenkins and other CI solutions like GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab Pipelines, CircleCI
You cannot talk about CloudBees without talking about Jenkins, and you cannot talk about Jenkins without speaking about Kohsuke (co-CEO, Launchable), its creator.
Jenkins continues to dominate the CI/CD DevOps market. Jenkins oversees hundreds of thousands of test suites, and CloudBees can deploy the Launchable solution to each one and use AI to improve their efficiency.
There are also several CI vendors in the market, in addition to Jenkins. Launchable’s approach is also CI agnostic. Thus, CloudBees can help folks struggling with QA regardless of which provider these pipelines exist on.
Launchable customers
If you have been one of our customers, I am deeply grateful for your support over the years.
We have seen a wide swathe of problems that our customers deal with. One of the challenges of a startup is that you can only fund so much to solve the problems. With the backing of CloudBees, we can now bring more resources to bear and help you.
We are excited that our team will grow and we can solve more problems faster.
Launchable team, investors, and founders
I want to thank our team (current and past) and our investors. Without their efforts, we wouldn’t have made it this far in the journey. Every one of them joined us because they believed in our vision. I am excited to continue our journey with our current employees in a bigger organization.
What makes the journey sweet for both Kohsuke and me (the founders of Launchable) that we have stood side-by-side with CloudBees founders help build CloudBees in an earlier life. It is a homecoming for us, and we couldn’t be more excited.
