Interview with Nicholas Mills, CircleCI General Manager, EMEA

Nicholas Mills, CircleCI General Manager, EMEA

We caught up with Nicholas Mills, General Manager, EMEA of CircleCI to discuss CircleCI as a business, how CircleCI is different to other companies in the same industry, how a surge in investment into venture-backed technology companies led to the company expanding, as well as how CircleCI is looking to grow.

 

Tell Us About CircleCI

CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on a mission to help engineering teams shorten the distance between idea and delivery.

Almost no business is immune from the need for quality software development. The act of building quality software and shipping it quickly, has become the core engine of value creation in companies across all industries, big and small. CircleCI allows teams to rapidly release code they trust by automating the build, test, and delivery process for both mobile and web apps, either in the cloud or on their own private server.

When the world runs on software, especially in a time of constant change, ensuring quality and fast recovery becomes paramount. At CircleCI we introduce a culture of testing, quality, innovation, and security that allows engineering teams to focus on building what matters most.

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What Makes CircleCI Different?

Through the company’s deeply-rooted belief in the power of the developer, CircleCI has cultivated a developer-first mindset since its founding in 2011 and has since grown that into the leading cloud-based platform for the automated building, testing, and deployment of new code.

At CircleCI, CI/CD is not just a side business – it’s the core of our offering. Our singular focus is what allows us to build the most intelligent and performant CI/CD tooling on the market. And because we believe developers’ ability to choose best-in-class tooling is so important, we invest heavily in extensibility, making the cost of integration with other key software development tools easy and low.

CircleCI also sits on top of nine years of processing data that provides us with a rich understanding of languages, architectural patterns, code testing patterns, delivery success rates, team practices, and more. Using this unique dataset, the largest of its kind, CircleCI is able to provide users visibility into important data points and key metrics, like velocity and time to recovery, so teams can find and fix problems quickly, and ultimately, deliver tremendous value to their customers

 

What Have You Learned?

Europe has witnessed a surge in investment into venture-backed technology companies, accounting for 16 percent of global venture capital investment in 2019.

This is largely why CircleCI expanded to Europe, opening an office in London last Autumn. London was a natural choice for CircleCI’s next regional headquarters and our operational launch pad into the region. We have a phenomenal base of established customers from some of the most innovative companies, not just in Europe, but in the world, such as Deliveroo, Monzo, Transferwise, Monday.com and Babylon Health.

CircleCI’s user base is reflective of the growing diversity of tech companies in Europe, spanning sectors including fintech, health tech, on-demand services, mobility, content management, and collaboration tools. And as the market shifts at a rapid pace, we’re seeing more of these companies double down on automation and continuous integration in order to remain resilient and continue delivering value. Just recently, we helped Livestorm, a video conferencing platform, remain stable during a 10x surge of new users due to the COVID-19 outbreak, while reducing their run time from 10 minutes to five. These technical improvements now pay large, sustainable dividends in the long term.

 

What Are Your Plans For Growth?

I joined CircleCI late last year to lead our European expansion and am thrilled to be a part of the team. Since joining we’ve seen a great deal of adoption in both established and emerging tech hubs, with monthly paying customer in more than 55 countries across EMEA. As our business develops, we’ll continue hiring and expanding our team to regions outside of the UK in order to support our growing user base.