eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
DevOps, the concept of matching development teams with operations specialists and automating processes to enable better software iteration, has been a growing category of IT for a few years, but only now is the venture capital community starting to put its money where the dev and ops are.
A key example of this is the unusually named JFrog, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup that has banked a $50 million investment round from new investors Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital, as well as participation from existing investors.
JFrog will use the funds to invest in the talent, technology advancements and global expansion needed to meet the growing demand for its DevOps and software automation platform, the company told eWEEK.
JFrog provides an end-to-end, multiple-package, secure binary code repository that organizations large and small can use to host, manage and distribute their software. It uses a freemium model to give away a portion of its functionality for free. The company now has more than 1,500 paying customers, including seven of the top 10 financial services companies, seven of the top 10 telcos, and eight of the top 10 Internet and software companies.
More than 700 million of its software packages are downloaded per month, and its full-time employee list has grown to more than 100 worldwide.
As more companies in every industry improve their value through software apps and the Web, they are experiencing the pain of moving to a modular software architecture to deliver software faster. Automating the continuous delivery pipeline is the only proven way to achieve rapid software delivery cycles. Automation providers are coming to the fore to provide these new-gen tools and processes, and venture capitalists are recognizing this opportunity.
“The software world is tired of domain dictators and demands a universal powerful solution that supports all technologies and software packages,” JFrog co-founder and CEO Shlomi Ben Haim told eWEEK. “DevOps and developer teams deserve more; they demand a multi-package, highly available and secured end-to-end solution. JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Bintray are not just a Docker registry, or an npm or Maven repository.”
The $50 million represents one of the largest VC investment rounds in the entire DevOps market history, Haim said. “We are the binary people; it’s either one or zero. No half-baked solution is good enough for our community and customers. With enough capital secured, we will continue to provide them with class A, enterprise-level products and services,” he said.
Atlassian and GitHub have revolutionized how developers manage source code; JFrog is revolutionizing how developers and DevOps team manage binary artifacts, Haim said. JFrog Artifactory, the only universal Artifact Repository, is an essential component of the Continuous Integration pipeline, he said.