Cloudsmith, a cloud platform for software supply chain management, has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, which it claims is the largest-ever Series A funding round in Northern Ireland since 2005 (according to PitchBook data). The company plans to use the new funding to hire 60 new employees and expand its U.S. sales and engineering teams.
Other investors in the round include Shasta, Amaranthine, Sorenson and Leadout Capital, as well as previous investors Frontline, MMC and Techstart. Docker CEO Scott Johnston, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar and Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar also participated in the round.
The Belfast-headquartered startup allows businesses to manage all the incoming software it uses via the cloud, meaning you don’t have to have dedicated support staff in the office, which requires dedicated staffing, VPNs and licenses.
Cloudsmith says its software scans for security vulnerabilities and has customers in Europe, the U.S., the Middle East and Australia, including the Internet Systems Consortium, Carta and Font Awesome.
Cloudsmith was founded in 2016 by former NYSE developers Alan Carson and Lee Skillen and announced a £2.1 million seed investment round led by Frontline Ventures, MMC Ventures and Techstart in 2019.
Alan Carson, co-founder and CEO of Cloudsmith, said: “Cloudsmith was built to tackle the complexity of managing software assets, which is a key challenge for any company to secure their software supply chains. Our service allows our customers to track and control the distribution of any software asset and provides tooling to minimize the risks of utilizing open-source software. It’s a massive problem for the whole industry and our investors, led by Tiger Global, understand the need for a fully managed cloud-native solution that Cloudsmith provides.”
Vidya Raman, principal at Sorenson Ventures, said: “While package management is by no means a new or flashy software space, it is a critical component of the software development lifecycle. The need for both cloud-native software development and secure software supply chains has resulted in the need to reinvent package management. That’s where Cloudsmith’s Continuous Packaging platform has come in and continues to lead that market. It is in the new world that Cloudsmith truly shines.”
Speaking to TechCrunch over a call, Carson added: “If you think about the last 10 years, it’s been about building automated pipelines. For companies to do deployments or distribute their software to other companies, they need tools, but they also need to move the assets around and store the assets that are both being pulled into that process and generated by that process and that’s what Cloudsmith ultimately does.”
He added: “Other companies tend to have legacy solutions. Our product is fully managed and makes it a lot easier for companies. They don’t have to put any resource behind keeping it up, we’ll handle it for them. So the total cost of ownership is lower. And they can spend more time actually crafting the software rather than worrying about how to store and distribute it within their internal systems.”