How Paul and Sonia Stovell built $1bn Octopus Deploy business from their kitchen

Software developer Paul Stovell and his CFO wife Sonia never thought the hobby started in their Brisbane kitchen would become a billion-dollar business with Nasa and Microsoft for clients.

Software developer Paul Stovell never thought the side hustle he started from his kitchen bench would become a billion-dollar business with Nasa and Microsoft among its clients.

But the 34-year-old founder of software firm Octopus Deploy can lay claim to being boss of the country’s latest unicorn - tech parlance for billion dollar start up – after the business garnered growing international success. The company earlier this year received a $US172.5m ($232m) investment from US-based Insight Partners.

According to The Australian’s list of the country’s top 20 unicorns, Octopus Deploy is valued at $1bn. The company joins another Brisbane-based startup, Go1, on the prestigious list.

Mr Stovell, who runs the Brisbane-based firm with his wife Sonia, was working as a programmer for a big international bank in London when he realised there had to be a better way to do handle the myriad of software updates large companies had to handle.

“A lot of upgrades and deployments had to be done manually by developers using check lists,” said Mr Stovell, who founded the company in 2012. “This could take hours and there was always a risk that things could be missed. That could prove costly for the company.”

Octopus Deploy automates updates of software systems, reducing the work load for human programers and reducing the risk of things going wrong.

Mr Stovell said he thought up the name of the company after sitting down with a customer one day and drawing a diagram to explain what they were going to do to deploy upgrades.

“There were all these lines going out from a circle in the middle of the paper and they looked like tentacles and it looked like an Octopus,” he said.

Octopus Deploy, which employs about 150 people, will soon move from its current Queen St location into new headquarters, also in Brisbane’s CBD, as it positions for further global growth.

“The new office will be spread over two levels and to maintain the octopus theme. There will be a tentacle wrapping around the column between the floors,” he said.

Paul and Sonia Stovell have built their billion dollar software from the ground up

Mr Stovell grew up in the South Australian industrial city of Whyalla, the oldest of five children and admits to “goofing around a bit in school.”

But when he discovered computers as a teenager, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

A self-taught developer he started programming when he was about 15, learning basic Javascript and becoming enthralled with the idea that you could make a computer do things through code.

“I started hanging out on programming forums and became fascinated by software companies,” he said.

“I dreamed of starting something like that. In a steel town where half the adults you know all work in the same industry, it seemed like a crazy dream.”

Mr Stovell said he never expected the business he started as a hobby could perhaps one day be good enough to be publicly traded and held in people’s retirement funds.

Octopus Deploy now has more than 7000 customers around the globe including 35 of the Fortune 100.

The Fortune 100, published by the magazine of the same name, is the list of the top 100 companies in the US.

“It started from our kitchen bench in our small London flat,” he said. “We never expected it to be this big. We thought it would grow to employ a handful of people.”

He said he and his Brisbane-born wife, who is the company’s chief financial officer, made a good team because of their complementary skills.

“I am very strategic while her strength is in finance,” he said.

Mr Stovell said that despite its humble beginnings, he had never considered Octopus Deploy a start-up. “We are a very profitable business,” he said. “We were a bootstrap business from the start with every dollar reinvested back into the company.”

The couple, who have three young children, love the weather and lifestyle afforded by Brisbane. “Brisbane is a place where people are happy to come,” he said.

In his downtime, Mr Stovell said he loved nothing more than grabbing a tool box and doing some carpentry. “A lot of my time these days is spent in zoom meeting so carpentry in an important hobby for me,” he said. “I like building things.”

Insight Partners managing director Michael Triplett said it was incredibly rare to have the opportunity to invest in a software company built from the ground up.

“We routinely talk to our portfolio companies about the products they use or that their customers are using and Octopus Deploy came up over and over,” said Mr Triplett, “The company has flown under the radar, but when you talk to their customers, they are huge fans.”