I'm excited to announce that FOSSA has raised an $8.5M Series A from Bain Capital Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. This brings our total funding to $11M and funds the growth of our incredible team, product and customer base.
Alongside this news, we're thrilled to share some stories about how we've helped hundreds of customers like Zendesk accelerate their product development, Uber build their open source program, and Verizon Media maximize their use of open source software.
As we take another step towards our mission of making open source accessible to everyone, we're even more excited to share the outcomes this means for our customers and vision for the future.
The Great Software War
Nearly 20 years ago when behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP reigned with proprietary software monopolies, open source felt like the antithesis to the enterprise. Today, the enterprise is fully embracing open source. Dozens of Open Source Programs Offices have booted up across the Fortune 500, internally evangelizing open source best practices. Analyst activity has fostered major technology investments to revitalize legacy development practices. Open source software now quietly runs in over 90% of all organizations.
The war of proprietary versus open source software has ended. Over the next decade, enterprises must learn to embrace open source as quickly as possible. With tens of billions of dollars at stake, it is now impossible to build great software without becoming great at using open source.
Using Open Source at Scale
FOSSA was born out of my own reactions as a developer to the need for open source while satisfying compliance and security mandates of the teams I worked on. To developers, the need for open source packages to build best-in-class software is obvious. Yet in legacy, large-scale companies, open source is burdened with policies, process and fire drills.
We initially built FOSSA for developers to automatically track which open source packages they used and manage the thousands of license obligations they came with. After releasing our scanning tool fossa-cli as open source itself, thousands of developers, the largest open source projects, and organizations like the CNCF and JS Foundation have rallied around FOSSA to run over 10M scans on our platform.
The data we gathered painted a clear opportunity in the enterprise. Everyone uses open source differently, and at a large scale organization, this complexity leads to a never-ending list of questions. Where did this code come from? Why is it getting used? Should we use this or build our own? Could this package lead to a bug, breach, or lawsuit? In the enterprise, the stakes to answer these questions are huge. Not only is there an immense business to protect, but increasing the use of open source accelerates the quality, arrival and net capabilities of product.
Since our initial funding, we've invested our energy into bringing an enterprise-ready solution to market. When we first looked, we saw most companies were still unaware of what open source code they depend on, and their existing tools and process buckled under the breadth, volume and complexity of their evolving development practices. Existing vendors were focused on facilitating audits rather than streamlining key developer and enterprise workflows for effectively using open source. With this round of funding, we're doubling down on helping large teams focus on innovating with open source instead of worrying about licensing, security and quality.
What's Next for FOSSA
Along with the customer stories we shared, the new round we've raised reiterates our commitment to the enterprise. Much has been in the works, and as we continue to invest in our customers, I look forward to the many exciting features we'll soon be announcing over the next couple of months.
Ultimately, all of this is credit for the heroic efforts of our incredible, passionate and hungry team. By the end of the year, we will be over 50 people across the San Francisco Bay Area and remote. If you're passionate about championing the open source, we'd love for you to join us on the ride. Come take a look at our open careers.
Long live open source,
- Kevin
