Sudden departure of scale-up chief executive

Software development testing company Buildkite has announced the sudden departure of co-founder and chief executive Keith Pitt.

A permanent successor is yet to be determined.  

Buildkite was valued at $200 million by a 2020 capital raising. The $US21 million (then $28 million) Series B raising was co-led by Australian venture firms OneVentures and Airtree, with participation from US firm General Catalyst and Dom Pym, founder of digital bank Up. OneVentures invested $15 million from its Growth Fund V.

In a 3 March announcement, the Melbourne-based scale-up said Pitt was stepping down as chief executive “opening the door to a new leader to take the company to the next stage of its growth”.

Pitt would remain engaged with the company as a major shareholder and would provide “ongoing input to support our customers and product vision”, Buildkite said.

The company’s chair Barry Crist, former chief executive of Chef Software, is to lead Buildkite during the search for a new chief executive.

Buildkite was founded in Perth in 2013 by Pitt and Tim Lucas. Lucas was co-chief executive until he left in 2022.

That year, Buildkite was selected by Victorian state government financed LaunchVic in the initial cohort of its 30X30 scale-up program which aimed to develop 30 companies to $1 billion valuations by 2030.

Clients of Buildkite include Uber, Block, Shopify, Canva and Culture Amp.

The company’s software is designed to enable software teams to host development and testing of new software on their own infrastructure while offloading user experience to a cloud-based interface. This is intended to enable DevOps teams to achieve closer performance parity to production systems as they develop software while retaining their source code in-house.

Buildkite has significant competitors in the field of software testing including Atlassian, Oracle and Queensland company Octopus Deploy.

Crist also announced the appointment of a new chief technology officer, James Wilson, most recently chief technology officer at WooliesX, the digital division of supermarkets chain Woolworths (ASX: WOW).

Prior to that, Wilson had led engineering teams at x15ventures, the in-house venture scale-up operation of the Commonwealth Bank (ASX: CBA). Earlier in his career, Wilson worked at Apple in California leading engineering teams developing various types of software including productivity apps.

Image: Departing Buildkite chief executive Keith Pitt.