I started Cirrus Labs in 2017 in the spirit of Bell Labs. I wanted to work on fun and challenging engineering problems, in the hope of bootstrapping a business as a byproduct.

The mission was to help fellow engineers with new kinds of tooling and environments that would make them more efficient and productive in the era of cloud computing. Even the name reflected that ambition: Cirrus, inspired by cirrus clouds, one of the highest clouds in the sky.

We never raised outside capital. That let us stay patient, stay close to the problems, and put a great deal of care into the products we built.

Over the last nine years, we were fortunate to innovate across continuous integration, build tools, and virtualization. In 2018, we introduced what we believe was the first SaaS CI/CD system to support Linux, Windows, and macOS while allowing teams to bring their own cloud. In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.