Gearset, a tooling provider for Salesforce software, announced today that it has raised $55 million in a financing tranche led by Silversmith Capital Partners. Co-founder and CEO Kevin Boyle said the new money will be spent on expansion Set of gears‘s product offerings, growth of sales and marketing functions and scaling of the team in the US and UK
Gearset was founded in 2015 by Boyle and Matt Dickens, two software engineers who would spend the majority of their careers building DevOps solutions at companies like EA, Red Gate Software and HP. (“DevOps” here refers to the set of practices and tools that automate and integrate software development processes between engineering and IT teams.) According to Boyle, they realized there was an opportunity to improve tooling in the Salesforce ecosystem, leading to to set up Gearset.
“Businesses invest in Salesforce because it can be so easily customized to the exact business requirements… [b]Their teams building on the platform find it difficult to deliver mission-critical applications and enhancements in a timely, secure or sustainable manner,” Boyle told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Large enterprises, in particular, typically struggle to master multiple workflows, divergent approaches to Salesforce development across the company, and countless development environments that can contain business data. Governance will be a major challenge.”
According to Boyle, Salesforce has hundreds of types of metadata and settings to argue about. And dependency issues between different types of Salesforce software components can crop up.
Image Credits: Set of gears
Gearset’s solution is a set of tools for deploying and maintaining Salesforce software in an organization. For example, the platform can automatically recommend solutions for packages, backup and restore data, and compare changes to metadata. Garset also provides visualizations of a company’s software release pipelines, including live status insights and branching options.
Gearset can be used as a standalone platform or integrated with existing tools and processes. From a dashboard, developers can deploy changes to Salesforce environments, configure automated pipelines to deliver updates, and view an audit history of all implemented changes.
“The concept of modern DevOps is emerging in the Salesforce community, so Gearset is focused on providing both the solution and the training to help everyone in the ecosystem understand best practices and implement them within their organizations,” he added. Boyle to it. “By using Gearset and implementing DevOps, the enterprise’s Salesforce team can release work to the company earlier, integrating continuous feedback and allowing the company to move flexibly. DevOps is also a much more robust approach that dramatically improves the visibility of the release pipeline and secures the company’s Salesforce investment.”
Gearset isn’t the first to market a “Salesforce DevOps” service. Competitors include Copado, Fiosum, OwnBackup and AutoRabit† But Boyle says demand for Gearset is “showing no signs of slowing down” as the market for Salesforce DevOps platforms is tied to Salesforce’s growth, which remains strong. According to one estimate, by 2021, Salesforce had a 32.2% share of the customer relationship management software market.
“Gearset is rapidly approaching 2,000 customers [including] McKesson, Accenture, IBM, Sage, Intercom, Johnson & Johnson, Veolia, Zillow, Sonos and Tripadvisor,” said Boyle. “Gearset’s annual recurring revenue is over $25 million and the company is profitable. [We’ve been] launched so far; this is our first institutional round.”
Gearset, which is based in Cambridge, aims to grow its workforce from 150 to 220 by the end of the year.