Gradle Technologies is now Develocity

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June 30, 2026

Gradle Technologies is Now Develocity: AI Moved the Bottleneck in Software Delivery

By The Develocity Team

You came here for gradle.com. You're reading this on develocity.ai. If that's a surprise, you're in the right place. This letter explains what changed, why, and what it means for you.

Here's the short of it: the human was always the bottleneck of software delivery, and AI just moved it. That's the problem we've reorganized around, which is why Gradle Technologies is now Develocity®. The company hasn't changed hands, the team is the same, and your accounts carry on as before. What's new is the name and the address. In GitLab's 2026 AI Accountability Report, 85% of developers and technology buyers agreed AI has shifted the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing and validating it.

That shift is the whole story behind the new name, and behind our sharper focus: becoming the context engineering layer for software delivery. We'll unpack what that means below.

What changed, and what didn't?

You might be wondering what this means for you. If you run builds with us, hold a license, or have a support relationship, the answer is simple: nothing on your side changes. A rename is ours to manage, not yours.

To put it plainly:

New: a name and a home that match the company we've grown into, built around AI-driven software delivery.

Unchanged: the company, the team, your contracts and accounts, and Gradle Build Tool™ — still open source, still free, still downloaded more than 80 million times a month.

If you bookmarked the old address, there's nothing to update — as of June 2026 it brings you straight to our main company page.

Why did the bottleneck move from people to the pipeline?

For three decades, software delivery pipelines were designed around one constant: the human. Build times, test cycles, review queues, and deploy windows were all tuned to the pace of developers typing, thinking, and approving. The pipeline was never meant to be the slow part. It didn't have to be, people were.

AI changed the constant. Agents write at machine pace, produce more change than any review queue was sized for, and read across codebases no single engineer holds in their head. The work that used to wait on a person now waits on the pipeline. The pipeline, unchanged, is now the slowest thing in the loop and needs more visibility, governance, and efficiency.

This isn't a tuning problem you can fix by buying faster machines. It's a question of what the pipeline was built for. When the volume and speed of change jump by orders of magnitude, the parts of delivery designed for human pace need to evolve. Every build and test runs far more often, so the cost climbs. And when an agent writes the change instead of a person, it gets harder to trust that what shipped was reviewed and has a clear owner.

That shift is what the company has evolved to meet.

What is Develocity now?

Develocity is the universal toolchain and artifact observability platform for AI-driven software delivery. It sits as a single layer between your toolchain and the people and AI agents that use it, turning everything that happens across your builds, tests, and dependencies into information that you and your agents can act on. That layer is what we mean by context engineering: the work of assembling the right information for a system to reason over, so it produces reliable, useful results. We think that's the layer modern software delivery is missing, and where we're putting our focus.

This builds on what customers already rely on Develocity today: build and test observability, Build Scan® insights, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and delivery intelligence across complex toolchains.

Develocity does two jobs, in this order.

Governance to keep AI-driven delivery accountable and auditable. When an agent writes the code, it also picks versions, pulls in dependencies, and makes calls a person used to make. The question is no longer "did a developer introduce a bug?" It's "what did the agent build, where did every piece come from, and does it meet our policy?" Develocity captures where each artifact came from across the whole toolchain, and enforces policy where software actually ships.

Efficiency to keep AI-driven delivery fast without runaway costs. AI multiplies how many builds and tests you run. Pipelines sized for human commit rates buckle under agent commit rates, and the cost climbs with them. Develocity cuts the wait so agents and developers get fast feedback, and cuts the compute bill so it doesn't rise in lockstep with AI volume. We think of this as yield, not austerity: getting more out of everything your delivery already pays for, without asking anyone to ship less or wait longer.

This is the same discipline our customers have relied on for years: observability across the whole software delivery pipeline. Today it's used by 72% of the Fortune 100, including Netflix, LinkedIn, ASML, Airbnb, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and SAP.

From the creators of Gradle Build Tool

Develocity is built by the team behind Gradle Build Tool — one of the most widely used build systems in the world. A decade of open-source work taught us how software behaves at scale, and that experience is the foundation everything on this platform is built on.

Gradle Build Tool continues as the open-source project it has always been. Its home, documentation, and community live at gradle.org.

Where we go from here

A name should say what you do. For years, ours pointed at a build tool. The work is bigger now, keeping software delivery governed and fast in a world where AI writes much of the software. Develocity names that work, and develocity.ai is where it lives.

Wherever you sit, the questions AI raises what got built, what it costs, and whether it meets policy are exactly what this layer exists to answer. The best way to see what that looks like is on your own builds, not in a slide.

Get started today with a 30-day free trial of the entire Develocity product suite, and see your own delivery data in action.

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