Welcoming Gradle Inc.

True portfolio company Gradle announced their funding today, and we are very excited to welcome Co-Founders Hans Dockter and Adam Murdoch, as well as the entire Gradle team, to True.

Gradle Inc. is the company behind the Gradle open source project and a pioneer in developing scalable enterprise build infrastructure. Every company, no matter the industry, is now a software company. As a result, developer productivity is a huge hot button, if not the #1 issue, for most enterprises today. Rapid and continuous development is of paramount importance, yet the development supply chain is still fairly broken with the level of complexity only increasing. We believe that Gradle is uniquely positioned to address this problem and has the potential to disrupt how we build software the way GitHub has disrupted how we write software and how Puppet has disrupted how we deploy software.

We have written before how we love open source companies because of the unfair advantages their built in communities give them. Gradle is no exception with thousands of deployments, close to a million downloads every month, and an ecosystem of over 600 plugins. Some of the leading companies in the industry including LinkedIn, Netflix, Google, Unity, Nike and Palantir are all current Gradle users, and Gradle is the default build system included with Android.

Hans, a lightning rod whose vision and passion is palpable, is the creator and inventor of Gradle and a clear thought-leader in the field of continuous delivery. Adam’s expertise includes build and deployment automation, automated software quality systems, web applications, networking, security projects, and software development process improvement. Hans and Adam have developed an impressive team, including innovators like Daz De Boer, one of the original contributors to Selenium, Miko Matsumura, former chief Java evangelist at Sun Microsystems, and Charles Warren, former SVP of product design at Salesforce.com and UX lead at Google for Mobile and Social.

From left to right: CEO Founder Hans Dockter, CMO Miko Matsumura and CPO Charles Warren (not pictured CTO Adam Murdoch and of course the entire Gradle team).

We couldn’t be more excited to partner with such a great team with the powerful mission to “Build Happiness.”

Hans, Adam, and team Gradle: Welcome to True!