Some angel investing news - it’s my pleasure to announce I’ve made an investment in Branch, a continuous integration service for WordPress developers.

As always (assuming the founders give permission), I like to document my thinking behind the investment, as a reference for myself in the future. The decision to back Branch wasn’t difficult.

• The business has a highly motivated founder who deeply understand the space: Peter Suhm. Peter has years of experience in the WordPress space from building and operating WP Pusher.

• WordPress remains the most popular way in the world to build a website (even if it’s not my cup of tea). One reason WP is so popular is that there is a gigantic community of plugins and tools developed by the thriving WP community. But precisely because of this massive universe of tools available to WP webmasters, again and again I would hear friends say what a pain point upgrading things was. They never have full confidence that things will work as they hope. This is a problem software should solve, and Branch is addressing this pain point by automating the entire build and testing process.

• The macro trend of SaaS and the move to the cloud, particularly in the case of tools for software developers, continues to gain momentum. Branch is well positioned to ride this wave.

• Finally, this is a good case of investor/product fit, in that I can hopefully bring some of my experience from OpenCage - where we also build an infrastructure service for developers - to the business.

If you are part of the WordPress community (or even if not) I encourage you to check out Branch. You can learn more by following @thisisbranch on twitter, following the Branch changelog, following Peter on twitter, or by listening to Peter’s weekly podcast Out of Beta (done together with Matt Wensing).

I am looking forward to watching Branch become a critical piece of the WordPress ecosystem.

Move fast, but test often so you don’t break things.