Bootstrap Complete: Aspect Build Raises $3.85M to Enable Developers in Massive, Multi-Language Codebases

Today we are thrilled to be featured in TechCrunch, announcing that Aspect Build has raised $3.85M in pre-seed and seed round funding led by FirstMark, with participation from Preston-Werner Ventures and several angel investors. This funding will accelerate the growth of our product, Aspect Workflows as we continue to empower software teams to overcome the challenges of modern development, enabling them to ship faster, more reliably, and at larger scale.

Addressing the Productivity Bottlenecks

It’s 2024, and many engineering organizations still struggle with slow, costly, and unpredictable developer workflows! The causes vary from unreliable dependency management, brittle IDE configuration, slow builds, and the impracticality of automated integration testing. Despite advancements in the DevOps stack like containerization, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code, the increasing complexity of software projects is driving up build times and slowing down teams. As projects grow, particularly with the rise of monorepos and reliance on third-party dependencies, idiomatic language-specific tooling is becoming a major bottleneck for companies striving to deliver features quickly and securely at scale.

At Aspect, we are uncomfortably excited to solve these problems. By mastering advanced techniques such as remote execution and caching and hermetic dependency management, we help teams eliminate the delays caused by slow and flaky builds. We bring developers along with us thanks to unrelenting focus on ergonomics, documentation, and support. Our system optimizes every step of the build process, ensuring that development teams can focus on creating and shipping great products.

Our Journey: bootstrapping from Google

Greg Magolan and I first worked together at Google on the Angular team adopting Bazel, a large-scale multi-language build system that pioneered how massive organizations like Google handled complex software builds. We loved that Google decided to open-source the tool, but it was very clear that companies would have difficulty achieving the benefits promised in the Bazel 1.0 blog post.

Rather than start with venture funding, we bootstrapped for three years by providing Bazel consulting services to over 50 companies. This gave us a front-row seat to witness painful bottlenecks that processes like dependency management, builds and Continuous Integration can create, and also the first taste of success in helping early customers overcome them.

Aspect placed a big bet on our Open Source Software, which for us is both a passion and our code of ethics. We’ve been the authors of Bazel’s JavaScript and TypeScript support from the beginning, and have added Docker (OCI), Python, and more. Just recently, the Bazel Central Registry got its 2,000th entry, and we’re proud that 23% of those are from Aspect! I was also the catalyst for moving Bazel’s community and yearly conference to the Linux Foundation, setting the stage for meaningful community governance.

With Aspect Workflows, we’re layering on our open-source and bringing that same level of optimization from our consulting days to a wider audience, helping software teams scale their workflows to manage scale and complexity.

Since launching, Aspect Workflows has deployed at numerous customers, provided 40-60% cost savings, accelerated builds 10x and tests 2-3x, all while maintaining the reproducibility and security necessary for complex, large-scale development.

Fueling Our Growth with Seed Funding

We met David Waltcher over two years ago. His insight was immediately obvious, as he wrote in his introduction to us, “I’ve been spending a lot of time around Bazel… as the Google family has permeated other organizations, everyone in our network has been raving about the multi-language support and caching.” We’re glad he followed us through our bootstrap journey and our gradual conversion to recurring revenue, and we’re proud to partner with FirstMark and Preston-Werner Ventures, who bring a wealth of experience in developer tools and share our vision for transforming how software teams operate. With their support, we’re excited to accelerate our product roadmap, expand our team, and push the boundaries of what’s possible in large-scale multi-language software development.

We frequently share exciting announcements, so follow us at https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspect-build/

-Alex Eagle

CEO, Aspect Build