About Gradle
Our story

We empower your organization to achieve software delivery excellence in the age of AI

Our story

2008-2010

The origins of Gradle

The story of Gradle begins with what was a common pain point among developers: the limitations of existing software build tools to automate the build process and provide efficient feedback. What began as an innovative personal experiment swiftly gained traction, leading to the release of Gradle Build Tool 0.1 in 2008. Early adoption by major open source projects provided crucial reach and demonstrated Gradle's potential to "make the impossible possible, make the possible easy, and make the easy elegant".

2010-2014

Expanding to the enterprise

Adoption of Gradle Build Tool grew among enterprises, and so did the demand for consulting services. Gradle Inc. was officially founded in 2010 to meet this demand, swiftly followed by Google's decision to select Gradle as the default build tool for Android. With the in-depth experience gained from consulting, it quickly became clear that enterprise businesses needed innovative new solutions to address developer challenges at scale—specifically, slow feedback loops, complex troubleshooting, and a lack of visibility into build health.

2014-2021

Introducing Develocity and pioneering DPE

In 2017, we launched Develocity, providing comprehensive observability, build and test acceleration technologies, and rapid troubleshooting features to support software development at scale. In 2021, we pioneered Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), a set of practices that treats developer productivity as a toolchain challenge rather than a people problem. The following year, we established DPE Summit, the only engineering conference dedicated to DPE and DevEx.

2021-2024

Supporting a diverse ecosystem

Over the next few years, we expanded Develocity support to a diverse toolchain landscape that includes Maven, sbt, npm, and Python. As a major supporter of the OSS community, we now sponsor free Develocity instances for over 25 foundations and projects, including the Apache Software Foundation, the Commonhaus Foundation, and the Spring ecosystem.

2025-Onward

Evolving in the age of AI

Today, Gradle Build Tool has surpassed 50 million downloads per month, and our mission has evolved along with the landscape. Our mission at Gradle, Inc. is to help leading technology and business brands strengthen continuous delivery practices and achieve software delivery excellence. We achieve this through products designed to tackle the complexity introduced by GenAI—shifting development left, maintaining fast feedback loops, simplifying failure troubleshooting, optimizing CI resource utilization, and strengthening supply chain security and governance.

Why people love us

We're incredibly thankful for our partnership with Gradle over the last decade, and are looking forward to many more years of working together to power fast and flexible builds!

Tor Norbye

Engineering Director of Android Studio, Google

Gradle is one of the most used build tools among GitHub users, and we're excited to continue to collaborate with them to improve supply chain security for the Gradle community.

Jon Janego

Senior Product Manager, GitHub

When we did our proof of concept with Develocity, the onboarding process was so easy and self-explanatory for our developers. It was a really enjoyable experience simply going through the trial, and that's what made the decision really quick.

Aida Issayeva

Staff Software Engineer, Toast