- Depot closes a $10 million Series A led by Felicis, with Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund.
- Co-founder Kyle Galbraith says the bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to integrating it.
- Depot CI, the company’s new engine, makes builds up to 40x faster and is compatible with GitHub Actions workflows.
- The company previously raised a $4.1 million seed round during the YC W23 batch.
- Long-term vision: a full software delivery platform covering source control, builds, and validation for the post-GitHub era.
A CI Engine Built for Agent-Speed Development
Depot has raised a $10 million Series A from Felicis, Y Combinator, and Pioneer Fund. Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie founded the company after experiencing the pain of slow Docker image builds firsthand. What started as a build acceleration tool has expanded into a platform spanning GitHub Actions runners, remote caching, and local builds — now processing workloads up to 40x faster than standard CI systems.
The funding will go toward the launch of Depot CI, a new engine built from scratch with performance as a first-class concern. It runs GitHub Actions workflows out of the box but is architecturally designed for the throughput that AI-assisted teams now demand. “The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to integrating it,” Galbraith wrote in the announcement. A team of 10 engineers with AI agents now moves like a team of 100 — and legacy CI systems like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Buildkite were never built for that volume.
Investors Bet on the Post-GitHub Stack
The round marks a milestone for Pioneer Fund, which co-led a Series A for the first time. “Depot started out solving one problem really well, but we could see their ambition and scope growing,” said Tim Suzman, Managing Partner at Pioneer Fund. “The faster people can code, the more important it becomes to unblock the rest of the DevTech stack.” Zach Waterfield, Investment Partner at Pioneer Fund and CTO at a seed-stage startup, has used Depot across Docker builds and CI runners. “Integration was straightforward, and we saw immediate performance gains with almost no overhead.”
Galbraith’s longer-term vision extends well beyond CI. Depot is building toward a full software delivery platform where source control, builds, and validation are designed from the ground up for the pace engineers and agents work at today. The existing providers — built for a world where humans batch up code and wait — are architecturally wrong for this moment. Depot CI is the bridge. What comes after it is the destination.
