EngFlow Acquires tipi.build, Brings Modern Build System Features to the C and C++ Community

The companies extend their previous collaboration on the CMake remote build execution service to deliver faster builds, next generation capabilities and improved software safety for engineers

ZURICH, March 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- EngFlow, the leading build acceleration company created by Bazel engineers and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, firstminute capital and Tiger Global, today announced the acquisition of tipi.build and the public beta of CMake RE, a remote execution service for the CMake software build system users.

The company is also announcing a new open source project, Hermetic FetchContent, which brings even more modern build system features to the C and C++ developers. All of these new products and features will be on display at the C++ Meetup in Zurich this Friday, March 14, 2025 at 6 pm CET.

With the acquisition, EngFlow customers will gain deeper expertise and more solutions for automated build system modernization and build caching with automated dependency analysis that seamlessly communicates with EngFlow's remote execution service.

The public beta of CMake RE provides C and C++ customers with a tool for build acceleration, caching and remote execution that provides leading performance and reliability.  Customers benefit from new features including local hermetic CMake builds, build and dependency caching (L1), and build distribution across autoscaled cloud build machines (L2), allowing cross-platform building and testing on Linux, Windows, MacOS and custom OSes.

"Software development is growing exponentially with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. CIOs and CTOs are under increasing pressure to ensure their build systems work fast but also correctly," said Helen Altshuler, CEO at EngFlow. "Our acquisition and close collaboration with the tipi team represents our strategic focus on ensuring CIOs, CTOs and platform engineers have all the tools necessary to meet this moment and ensure cutting-edge productivity for their development teams. The new CMake RE build features are evidence of this work, and HermeticFetchContent makes it all that more accessible."

"Companies in fields like finance, AI, robotics, video-streaming and IoT rely on native code to boost performance and slash required resources for their products and platforms. But the long compilation times drain developer productivity. We believe it is key to building a sustainable Internet and AI future to enable native developers to deliver safe, reliable, performant and low footprint code at maximum velocity. Teaming up with the incredible individuals at EngFlow allows us to execute on our mission at the largest scale." - Damien Buhl, co-founder tipi.build 

EngFlow led tipi.build's seed investment round in 2022. The companies built CMake RE to automate caching and cloud-based distributed build execution, which they began to work on together immediately following the investment. CMake RE dramatically reduces C and C++ build times to mere minutes and helps ensure the integrity of the software security supply chain. EngFlow is proud to welcome the tipi.build team to its family as the pioneer in advanced build and dependency caching for CMake and native cross-platform development.

HermeticFetchContent Addresses Software Safety and Continuous Delivery Challenges
Engineering platform teams using C and C++ are facing new challenges when it comes to safe and continuous software delivery. Compiling and automated testing for Rust, C and C++ code is compute intensive and common codebases can take many hours to compile, generating very large build trees. The issues are exacerbated when teams add static analyzers and sanitizer instrumentation to their builds and tests to handle safety requirements recently defined by the NSA, the White House and the European Union (cf. Delivering Safe C++, CppCon 2023, Bjarne Stroustup, C++ Inventor,  National Cybersecurity Strategy, White House, March 2023, Software Memory Safety, National Security Agency, November 2022, Cyber resilience act, European Union, September 2022 ).

These new requirements are why the company is releasing HermeticFetchContent, a CMake module that provides sensible dependency management and dependable provenance mechanisms including Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). When combined with CMake RE, platform engineers get the necessary build configurability and throughput, leveraging caching and remote execution, so that teams can safely and reliably build and run tests with sanitizers and static analyzers.

For example, on the Boost project – one of the most popular C++ software libraries – build times speed up by a factor of 10 to over 21 (benchmark details and data available at https://github.com/tipi-build/hfc-bench).

"We teamed up with tipi.build, creators of CMake RE and HermeticFetchContent, to optimize our CMake build targeting hundreds of configurations. Their approach of source-based, cached builds has not only accelerated our build but also improved safety by allowing us to enable sanitizers across our dependency chain," said Jody Hagins, Prolific C++ Engineer in the high frequency trading space and ISO C++ Standards Committee Member.

Software changes across Artificial Intelligence (AI), phones, cars, autonomous systems, financial services and more depend on the speed and reliability of build systems. As software code bases become bigger, code gets AI generated and more complex and are targets for security attacks, a dramatically new approach that can allow engineers to collaborate and rapidly release software is required.

The open source project Bazel has emerged in recent years as one of the best build systems for today's highly complex, polyglot codebases and is inherently designed to overcome these issues. EngFlow's Bazel cluster technology offers the leading build system performance for large development teams – build and test times can be reduced by 10x or more.

With the combination of both companies and their respective technologies, tipi.build and EngFlow are bringing all the benefits of Bazel remote execution and caching to CMake without requiring disruptive build system migrations.

For more information, please visit: https://www.engflow.com/product/cmakere

About EngFlow
EngFlow is the build and test acceleration company created by core Bazel engineers and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and firstminute capital. EngFlow's secure (audited: SOC 2, type 2) remote execution, caching, and observability platform scales from 1 to 100,000+ cores and reduces build time by 5-10x and cloud costs by 20-50%. The platform is compatible with a variety of build systems, including Bazel, Buck v2, CMake, AOSP and Chromium. EngFlow products are used by engineers from startups to Fortune 500 companies to accelerate developer productivity and positively impact engineering culture. Whether deployed on your cloud or on EngFlow's, EngFlow's global Bazel and developer productivity experts provide 24x7 coverage and support small and large teams with no hidden costs, SSO included. For more information, visit: https://www.engflow.com/.

About tipi.build
tipi.build provides fast remote C, C++ and Rust builds with cutting-edge caching technology based on CMake and Git. Tipi empowers developers to test and build cross-platform instantly, and seamlessly add cloud CPU cores when needed, bringing continuous integration to developers' fingertips. Based in Zürich, Switzerland, Tipi was founded by CMake enthusiasts and C++ developers who want to increase developer flexibility without sacrificing performance or safety. Tipi products are used to develop critical software for the IoT, financial trading, medical devices, automotive sectors and more. For more information, visit:  https://tipi.build/.

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https://www.engflow.com/news/2023-10-05 

SOURCE EngFlow