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Buildkite Welcomes Dr Michelle Deaker as Board Member
Fri, 24th Mar 2023
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Leading software development company Buildkite has announced today that Dr Michelle Deaker, MD and founding partner of OneVentures, is joining the company's board of directors.

Barry Crist, Adam Gross, and Dr Michelle Deaker have been appointed as new board members. The trio will serve as key advisors to Buildkite's team, playing an integral role in the evolution of the company by providing strategic guidance to continue innovating the DevOps industry.

Barry Crist is a well-known name in the DevOps industry. He served seven years as CEO and board chair for Chef Software, an early DevOps innovator and leader. In his new role as board chair, Crist's deep-rooted experience with DevOps build and test is a great addition to Buildkite's mission to unblock every developer on the planet. "Buildkite is one of the few companies that is poised to disrupt how any organisation builds and tests software in a zero trust world," said Crist.

Adam Gross brings his experience from some of the fastest-growing software companies in the industry, including Heroku, Salesforce, and Dropbox. Gross has a storied history in building successful developer-first models that allow users to experience and adopt a product for free, with scale-up enterprise opportunities. This, coupled with his excitement for high-growth companies, will be crucial as Buildkite continues to scale and uplevel its secure CI operations across the globe to offer customers more control and security. "Buildkite has exponential growth potential, and I am excited to be a part of their success story," says Gross.

Dr Michelle Deaker is managing director and founding partner of Australian venture capital firm OneVentures. She brings more than 20 years of experience in developing technology companies in Australia and the US, with expertise in global business expansion. "We've been a long-time champion of Buildkite, seen its potential first hand and had the pleasure of witnessing its growth," said Deaker. "There is a clear need to provide secure software solutions, and Buildkite is at the forefront of that development."

Keith Pitt, CEO and co-founder of Buildkite, expressed his delight at the appointment of the new board members. "Their knowledge and expertise will be pivotal to our goal of supporting developers at every stage," Pitt said. Buildkite is one of the fastest and most secure ways to build, test, and deploy software at any scale. The company's continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) platform allow teams of all sizes to run fast, secure, and scalable pipelines on their infrastructure.

Founded in 2013 by software engineer Keith Pitt, Buildkite was the first to introduce a self-hosted agent model and now supports over 1,000 customers across the world.