Buildkite Snags former Chef and Heroku CEOs To Sit On The Board Of The Company

The new board members will serve as key strategic advisors to the company as it continues to revolutionize the future of the DevOps industry

PERTH, Australia, March 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Buildkite, an industry-leading software development company, today announced the appointment of three new board members, Barry Crist, Adam Gross and Dr Michelle Deaker. With more than three decades of combined experience across software and technology, the new members will serve as key advisors to Buildkite's team, playing an integral role in the evolution of the company by providing strategic guidance to continue innovating the DevOps industry.

Barry Crist served seven years as CEO and Board Chair for Chef Software, an early DevOps innovator and leader. In addition to past roles at industry leaders such as Apple and Mercury Interactive, he also holds pivotal roles as an advisor and board member across other influential B2B technology solutions, including Magnify and Rossum. In his new role as Board Chair, Crist's deep-rooted experience with DevOps build and test is a great addition to Buildkite's mission to unblock every developer on the planet.

"Buildkite is one of the few companies that is poised to disrupt how any organization builds and tests software in a zero trust world," said Barry Crist. "Buildkite's fundamental earliest architectural choices set them apart: as a hybrid SaaS solution, they run the build/test engine but all your most valuable assets (secrets, source code) are held by you and are immune to attacks on Buildkite's SaaS infrastructure. This hybrid approach allows Buildkite's customers to experience not only a safer build/test solution but also one that by design is faster and cheaper compared to fully hosted approaches. I first experienced the Buildkite advantage as a customer at Chef, and later as I did strategy and customer research work with the leadership team."

Prior to joining the Buildkite team, Adam Gross worked at some of the fastest-growing software companies in the industry, including Heroku, Salesforce, and Dropbox. Gross has a storied history in building successful developer-first models that allow users to experience and adopt a product for free, with scale-up enterprise opportunities. This, coupled with his excitement for high-growth companies, will be crucial as Buildkite continues to scale and uplevel its secure CI operations across the globe to offer customers more control and security.

"One of the things that make Buildkite unique is that it's architected to take advantage of all of the growth and innovation that's happening with cloud platforms," says Adam Gross. "Their level of flexibility, scalability and efficiency can't be matched and sets the company up to benefit from new innovations. Buildkite has exponential growth potential, and I am excited to be a part of their success story."

In addition to Barry Crist and Adam Gross joining the Buildkite board, Dr Michelle Deaker also rounds out the new board appointments following a $21 million raise in 2022. Dr. Michelle Deaker is Managing Director and Founding Partner of Australian venture capital firm OneVentures and brings more than 20 years of experience in developing technology companies in Australia and the US, with expertise in global business expansion.

"We've been a long-time champion of Buildkite, seen their potential firsthand and had the pleasure of witnessing their growth," said Deaker. "Their agile solutions have been instrumental to the success of start-ups to billion-dollar companies, and I am delighted to be joining their board to support them on the next stage of their journey. There is a clear need to provide secure software solutions, and Buildkite is at the forefront of that development."

"I'm thrilled to welcome the addition of Barry Crist and Adam Gross to Buildkite," said Keith Pitt, CEO and co-founder of Buildkite. "Their knowledge and expertise will be pivotal to our goal of supporting developers at every stage."

Buildkite is the fastest and most secure way to build, test, and deploy software at any scale. The company's continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) platform allow teams of all sizes to run fast, secure and scalable pipelines on their own infrastructure. Founded in 2013 by software engineer Keith Pitt, the company was the first to introduce a self-hosted agent model and now supports over 1,000 customers across the world, including Canva, Intercom, Shopify, Venmo, Webflow, and more.

SOURCE Buildkite