In the year In 2015, Google launched an open source port of its internal automation tool for building and testing code. Basel (since the internal tool was called Blaze) uses the Python language to help developers write their own rules and macros. Today, the tool is used by companies ranging from Adobe to Databricks, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Redfin, so much so that Basel is where Ulf Adams, lead at Google and enterprise customer for Basel, is the onboarding leader at Google and co-creator of BaselCon. , Helen Altshuler, Basel-centric startup EngFlow raised new funding, perhaps worth paying attention to.
The group announced today that EngiFlow has raised an $18 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner and Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli, as well as Messenger creator Matt Klein and GitHub VP of Engineering Rachel Potvin participated in this round.
Image Credits: Basel
EngFlow describes itself as a “build accelerator company” that helps its enterprise customers build efficiently and support their source code for Basel, Chromium and the Android Platform.
“When we talk about the use of Basel at Google, one important thing is that Google integrates Basel with many developer services,” Adams said. “So it’s not just the build tool, but you have remote execution, you have the user interface, you have cover runners to analyze coverage data from tests, you have integration with deployment, all of that. We’ve been talking to Basel users for four years and they’re looking for these things. Sometimes Google Snow We say it’s a particle, Google is unique, but we often see other companies wanting to do similar things, and we thought there was an opportunity there.
Altshuler also emphasized that more and more enterprises are creating platform engineering teams that aim to bring a conceptual approach to CI/CD to their teams. This is usually the audience for them to try to get Basel working for their organization and then launch it to engineers. These platform engineering teams are our main customers, but behind every platform engineering team there are hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of engineers who are affected by Basel and don’t have to be Basel experts and hopefully know it all. The internal thing just works for them,” she said.
Image Credits: Basel
The team notes that many new customers are migrating to the service from Gradle or Simec, so it may come as no surprise that EngFlow recently hired Jay Conrod, developer of the open-source Gazelle tool (also ex-Googler), to migrate to Basel.
While Basel is the main focus here, it’s worth noting that the platform supports Chromium and Android platform builds. Clever, with a Chromium-based browser, is a client, for example. For Brave, EngFlow’s distributed build system reduced build times from two hours to fifteen minutes. But still, Basel is the main focus here and today the team launched the Bazel Invocation Analyzer, a new open source tool that allows developers to gain deeper insights into their Basel profiles and optimize their builds.
“Building is one of the most critical aspects of software development. And it’s traditionally been a huge time and expense for companies to get right,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “EngFlow is the leading company that’s changing all that.” Coming from the deep roots of Basel, they have developed a solution that we have never seen before, to deal with the most complex code bases and large infrastructure environments, and deliver incredible savings in development time and costs. These are no mere words, EngFlow pulls in a much larger customer base than we typically see at this stage across multiple verticals. We are delighted to be investors and double down as NGFlow continues its path as a leading construction company.
Given the popularity of Google taking open source tools and bringing them into the enterprise (hello Kubernetes), it’s no surprise that EngFlow isn’t the only startup in this space. BuildBuddy, sponsored by YC, for example, offers a Basel-centric build system. Meanwhile, the well-supported Gradle Enterprise provides support for Gradle, Maven, and Basel as part of an enterprise build tool.
