Gearset, a tooling provider for Salesforce software, today announced that it raised $55 million in a funding tranche led by Silversmith Capital Partners. Co-founder and CEO Kevin Boyle said that the new money will be put toward expanding Gearset’s product offering, growing its sales and marketing functions and scaling the team across the U.S. and U.K.
The company was founded in 2015 by Boyle and Matt Dickens, two software engineers who’d spent the better part of their careers building DevOps solutions at companies such as EA, Redgate 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 the tooling in the Salesforce ecosystem, which led them to found Gearset.
“Enterprises invest in Salesforce because it can so easily be adapted to meet exact business requirements … [b]ut their teams building on the platform find it hard to deliver business-critical applications and improvements in a way that’s timely, secure, or sustainable,” Boyle told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Large enterprises, in particular, typically struggle to keep on top of multiple workstreams, disparate approaches to Salesforce development across the business, and countless development environments that may contain business data. Governance becomes a significant challenge.”
To Boyle’s point, Salesforce has hundreds of metadata types and settings to wrangle. And dependency issues between different Salesforce software component types can crop up.
Gearset’s solution is a set of tools for deploying and maintaining Salesforce software across an organization. The platform can automatically recommend fixes to packages, for example, and can back up and restore data as well as compare changes to metadata. Gearset also offers visualizations of a company’s software release pipelines, including “live status” insights and branching options.
It 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 deployed changes.
“The concept of modern DevOps is nascent in the Salesforce community, so Gearset focuses on providing both the solution and the training to help everyone in the ecosystem understand best practices and implement them within their organizations,” Boyle added. “By adopting Gearset and implementing DevOps, the enterprise’s Salesforce team can release work to the business sooner, incorporating continuous feedback and allowing the business to move with agility. DevOps is also a much more robust approach that dramatically improves visibility of the release pipeline and secures the business’s Salesforce investment.”
However, Gearset isn’t the first to market with a service for “Salesforce DevOps.” Competitors include Copado, Flosum, OwnBackup and AutoRabit. But Boyle says that demand for Gearset “shows no signs of slowing down,” given that the market for Salesforce DevOps platforms is tied to Salesforce’s growth, which remains strong. By one estimate, Salesforce had a 32.2% share of the customer relationship management software market in 2021.
Boyle said, “Gearset is fast approaching 2,000 customers [including] McKesson, Accenture, IBM, Sage, Intercom, Johnson & Johnson, Veolia, Zillow, Sonos, and Tripadvisor. Gearset’s annual recurring revenue is more than $25 million and the company is profitable. [We’ve been] bootstrapped to date; this is our first institutional round.”
Based in Cambridge, Gearset aims to grow its 150-employee workforce to 220 by the end of the year.
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