Atomist launches to help developers automate repository creation and code deployment

A new company emerged from stealth today, aimed at helping developers better automate the work they’re doing. Called Atomist, it’s designed to help developers automatically create source code repositories and then automate the deployment of their code in a way that helps ensure quality while maintaining the velocity of rapid changes.

Atomist is supposed to help businesses get to the point where they’re able to deliver rapid code changes much like large tech titans, without requiring the technical know-how wrapped up in those larger organizations.

The system is built on top of a graph database that takes information about a company’s codebase, users, and usage patterns to help better understand the way people work. That information is used to help contextualize different code changes so that it’s possible for Atomist to understand when people are pushing major updates versus minor changes.

That understanding can be used to help automate key tasks at scale. For example, the system can be used to automatically roll out security, framework, and code library updates across a wide number of projects.

On top of that, the system integrates with Slack and can notify users of key events in their source code repository. What’s more, it’s possible for people to interact with Atomist through Slack, so it’s possible for them to do things like add pull requests and push releases without leaving a chat channel.

In addition to its official unveiling, Atomist also announced that it raised $22 million in a round of series A funding from Accel and Matrix Partners. The funds will be used to fuel the company’s research and development, plus go-to-market efforts. It already has a number of customers, including Pivotal and Nvidia.

The company will offer its service for free to open source projects, and commercial users will be able to kick the tires on Atomist using the free tier, which allows for building software with a small number of events per month. Atomist also offers a paid cloud-hosted service, as well as an enterprise edition that can be deployed on-premises for those companies that want to keep their build systems on their own infrastructure.