Paul Stovell started building Octopus Deploy in 2011 as a side project. Many teams could test code automatically but still released it by hand, and Octopus focused only on that last step.
By 2012 the business was profitable and covered the salaries of both founders. Before it had real revenue, a buyer offered A$100,000 for it. Stovell thought it was a great deal, but his wife Sonia reminded him that he had always wanted to run a software company, and he kept it. She later became CFO.
From 2011 to 2021 the company took no outside money, and Stovell never wrote a pitch deck. He turned away venture capital approaches for a decade, while about 25,000 organisations came to use the product, more than half of them in North America.
In April 2021 Insight Partners bought a minority stake for $172.5 million. Headcount rose from about 80 to more than 180 that year. Octopus later acquired the Kubernetes delivery firm Codefresh.