After fuelling up with $25 million USD in Series A financing, American developer tools startup AtomicJar plans to tap into Canada’s “huge” tech talent pool.
AtomicJar is the company behind the Testcontainers project. To date, the open-source offering has helped engineering teams at companies like DoorDash, Spotify, Uber, and Googletest software, surpassing 100 million downloads last year.
“Fundamentally, we believe that this approach we are advocating for is amazing, and we have the numbers to prove that developers believe that as well.”
-Eli Aleyner, AtomicJar
As it looks to build on the largely organic growth of Testcontainers, the New York-based startup—which has a Canadian, Toronto-based co-founder in Eli Aleyner—is gearing up to hire engineering and go-to-market (GTM) staff north of the border.
In an interview with BetaKit, Aleyner noted that the startup is “actively looking to scale up” its presence in both the United States and Canada, where he said he sees lots of quality tech talent with cloud and product-led growth experience. To support the launch of its commercial Testcontainers Cloud offering, AtomicJar plans to add at least another 12 employees to its 23-person team.
“We want to leverage the fact that I’m based over here and I’m local and have been in the community for a little bit of time,” said Aleyner. “We absolutely want to build a centre of excellence [in Canada] and really double down on this locale.”
AtomicJar’s $25 million USD Series A round, which fully closed late last year, was led by New York’s Insight Partners. The all-equity round also saw participation from existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Tribe Capital, Chalfen Ventures, and Snyk co-founders Guy Podjarny and Peter McKay, and new investors Irregular Expressions, software industry veteran Walter Scott, and Tackle.io’s co-founders.
Aleyner declined to disclose AtomicJar’s valuation, noting that the round brings the firm’s total funding to $29 million. As part of the round, Insight managing director Jon Rosenbaum has joined AtomicJar’s board.
A Canadian currently working out of Toronto, Aleyner began his career at Amazon as part of the engineering team that founded Amazon Web Services. The University of Waterloo graduate, who has also spent time working at Microsoft and Toronto developer tools firm Pivotal, has spent nearly his entire career working in the developer ecosystem.
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Aleyner teamed up with experienced software developer Sergei Egorov—AtomicJar’s New York-based CEO—to create Testcontainers in 2015, with the goal of helping developers test software more easily. “We found a niche, an interesting niche that helps companies to build software better [and] to do better integration testing, which we believe is part of [the] core software development process,” said Aleyner.
AtomicJar’s open-source Testcontainers product hit 50 million downloads in April 2022. By the end of last year, the offering had doubled that, growing at a rate of around six million per month. In response to this demand, the company is gearing up to roll out its first commercial solution, called Testcontainers Cloud, starting with a beta available today.
“Fundamentally, we believe that this approach we are advocating for is amazing, and we have the numbers to prove that developers believe that as well,” said Aleyner.
To tackle the opportunity it sees in this space, on the engineering side, Aleyner noted that AtomicJar is looking to add people who have built cloud solutions and cloud-scale products before. GTM-wise, AtomicJar is seeking folks with product-led growth experience.
At the same time, Aleyner noted that AtomicJar is “looking to grow sustainably” in light of current market conditions, adding that AtomicJar currently has three-plus years of runway.
Feature image courtesy AtomicJar.