Typesafe, a company that makes it easy to build and deploy software built on the Scala software language, has raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Shasta Ventures with Juniper Networks (the Junos Innovation Fund), Greylock Partners and François Stieger (former executive at Verisign, Broadvision, and Oracle) participating.
Essentially, Typesafe does for Scala what Cloudera does for Hadoop. The company was actually founded by the creators of the Scala programming language and Akka framework. The Typesafe Stack, which is compatible with Java, combines the Akka middleware framework, the Play web framework, and the Scala programming language.
It can be used for building large-scale, data-rich applications in Java and Scala and can scale to large workloads in cloud computing and virtualized enterprise datacenter environments. The company’s Typesafe Subscription complements the Typesafe Stack with commercial support, maintenance, and operations tools. The startup also offers training and consulting services to help organizations and companies adopt Akka, Play, and Scala.
As Jason Pressman, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures explains, there is a “massive market adoption of Scala,” and Typesafe is in a good position to help take advantage of this trend.
So why would a company use Scala? CEO Mark Brewer tells is that Scala is a fully-functional and object-driven programming language that provides a more expressive way of typing code. “Typesafe allows developers to effectively develop robust applications that address the dual challenges of large-scale distributed “cloud computing” applications and massively multicore hardware platforms while still integrating seamlessly with the Java infrastructure,” said Pressman.