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npm Inc., the company that hosts and manages npm, a popular package manager for JavaScript, announced that it has raised $8 million for a Series A round of funding and also has launched a new feature known as Private Modules.
The series was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), an investor in developer-facing businesses, and Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil will join the board. True Ventures also participated in the round. The company previously raised $2.6 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, and a number of other individual investors.
The new Private Modules feature of the platform enables developers to share and re-use private and confidential code. Pricing plans for npm Private Modules will be $7 per month for individuals. More than 2,000 developers have already signed up to trial the service.
“We’re in a new era of module-driven development where software is built using a multitude of building blocks instead of one monolithic code base,” said Isaac Schlueter, CEO and co-founder of npm Inc., and creator of npm, in a statement. “npm was designed to fit seamlessly in this new way of coding, making developers’ lives easier and enabling better collaboration across teams…”
npm officials said 2.4 million JavaScript developers use the npm package manager on a daily basis. In addition, there are one billion packages downloaded every month via npm’s registry of more than 140,000 packages of JavaScript code. The popularity of service oriented architectures and micro-services now require sophisticated orchestration with hundreds of SDKs for APIs and other independent pieces of code. npm’s ability to instantly install, publish and manage JavaScript packages, in addition to its versioning capabilities with different dependencies, have made it a staple in developers’ toolkits as they adopt this approach.
“The Unix philosophy that npm follows of small modules has been a real boon for us,” said Dion Almaer, vice president of engineering at Walmart Labs. “It is also critical to make sure that you can manage these dependencies and make sure that they are available in a secure way, which npm Private Modules provide.”
“Module driven development is a growing priority in our development workflow at DocuSign, and npm has been critical to enabling that shift,” said Edmond Meinfelder, node architect at DocuSign, in a statement. “We have benefited from npm’s enterprise offering supporting our security needs, and npm Private Modules is a great addition to npm’s toolkit; it’s key for individuals and companies who want to protect their intellectual property.”
Companies that use npm for publishing its SDKs for JavaScript include Twilio, Google, Microsoft, New Relic and Amazon Web Services.
“npm is fast becoming essential to the future of JavaScript development,” said Ethan Kurzweil, partner with Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement. “Under Isaac’s leadership, Node.js went from a side project to a means for enterprises to run critical infrastructure. As we pursued an investment in npm, I was overcome by developer love for the team, product and company. And while I’m still not sure what ‘npm’ actually stands for, my personal acronym became ‘now pick me!’ I didn’t want to miss out in the future success of this company; I had to get involved.”
“npm is critical to making Node.js work; it is the default package manager and the key gateway for anybody building Node.js apps,” said Puneet Agarwal, a partner at True Ventures. “Isaac, Laurie Voss and Rod Boothby comprise a veritable dream team of Node.js superstars, and we are thrilled to continue our support of their company.”
npm Inc. was founded in 2013 by Isaac Schlueter, along with Rod Boothby, an entrepreneur with a quantitative background in derivatives finance and risk management, and Laurie Voss, a developer who also co-founded a successful startup that was acquired in 2014.