Earthly Technologies Inc., a startup helping software teams deploy code to production faster and with less work, today disclosed that it has raised $6.5 million in funding.

The investment is described by the startup as a “seed plus” funding round. It was led by Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm affiliated with former Google LLC Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. Existing backers 468 Capital and Uncorrelated Ventures participated as well.

Early provides an open-source platform of the same name for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD, pipelines. A CI/CD pipeline is a software workflow that turns the raw code written by a company’s developers into a functioning program. The workflow checks the code for bugs, compiles it and, if no issues emerge, releases it to production.

Creating CI/CD pipelines can be technically challenging. Such pipelines often have to be written in the YAML language, which is considered difficult to use. Moreover, there are cases where CI/CD projects require developers to use not one but multiple programming languages.

To reduce complexity for software teams, Earthly has developed a new syntax geared specifically towards creating CI/CD pipelines. The syntax is included in the startup’s platform. According to the company, developers can understand the code of CI/CD pipelines created using its platform even if they have no prior experience using it.

Another challenge involved in CI/CD pipeline development that Earthly hopes to address relates to software testing. 

Like all software products, CI/CD pipelines have to be checked for errors before they’re deployed. Developers usually test software for errors by attempting to run it on their personal computers. However, running CI/CD pipelines on developers’ computers historically hasn’t been practical because of various technical constraints.

Earthly says its platform removes that obstacle. The platform packages CI/CD pipelines into software containers, which enable code to easily run on different types of computers. As a result, developers can run Earthly-powered CI/CD pipelines on their machines for testing purposes in situations where it usually wouldn’t be practical to do so.

The company also promises to speed up developers’ work in other ways. Its platform stores the results of calculations that CI/CD pipelines repeat often while processing code. It then reuses the results instead of calculating them from scratch every time, which improves performance. 

“Earthly CI’s killer feature is that it allows developers to run CI/CD pipelines on their local machines, making the process of iteration dramatically more efficient,” said founder and CEO Vlad Ionescu. “Executing the pipeline in the cloud is also ridiculously fast — usually twice as fast as a traditional CI — thanks to the completely novel caching and parallelization techniques that just work, automatically, for everyone, with no configuration required.”

The company offers its open-source platform alongside a paid version, Earthly CI, that became generally available today. It’s provided on a software-as-a-service basis and includes additional features aimed at reducing the amount of manual work involved in CI/CD projects.

The proceeds from the new round will go toward hiring more employees and developing new features for Earthly CI. In parallel, the startup plans to continue making enhancements to the open-source version of its platform.

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