JFrog Takes Big Leap Forward With $50 Million Round

JFrog, a developer of open source software distribution tools, announced a $50 million round today. The investment represents a substantial jump for the company, which previously had raised $10.5 million across two rounds.

Investors include Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital, as well as participation from existing investors Gemini Israel Ventures and VMware.

JFrog offers commercial and enterprise versions of two main products: JFrog Bintray helps developers distribute software in an automated fashion, while JFrog Artifactory helps manage the software packages prior to distribution.

What differentiates these products from the rest of the market, says CEO Shlomi Ben Haim, is that they are platform agnostic, meaning that they can integrate with a range of developer tools. The company has raised a rather modest $10.5 million since it launched in 2008 and one of the reasons it went looking for this kind of money is that it needs more resources to keep up with demand for the growing number of integration requests from the community.

JFrog’s customer list boasts some impressive names including Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Cisco, VMware (an investor), Netflix and MasterCard among others.

As an example, Google distributes Android using Bintray.

These are companies that are constantly releasing software update and JFrog brings a level of automation to the process at the binary level, not unlike GitHub does at the code level, Haim explained.

After eight years, the company has 110 employees and expects that to balloon to around 200 by the end of this year. Haim admits that it’s sometimes hard to grow the company organically, so he plans to look around for strategic acquisitions that could enhance the product using his newly fattened checkbook instead of his engineering team.

That would solve two problems. It would provide the company with missing functionality, but it would also likely include engineering talent in the process.

The company’s biggest competition according to Haim is dedicated support offerings such as Maven for Java developers or Docker’s Registry tool for Docker users. What his company offers is a tool that works across these different developer tools.

As Haim points out, there is no company out there using a single developer environment to develop software, no matter their size. By offering a set of tools that crosses these different environments, JFrog is attempting to streamline the whole software distribution and management process.