INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying
with licensing requirements
They also need to ensure the open-source bits are being updated over time for security purposes
That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million Series A.The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with
help from Costanoa Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners
Today’s round brings the total raised to $11 million, according to the company.Company founder and CEO Kevin Wang says that over the last
18 months, the startup has concentrated on building tools to help enterprises comply with their growing use of open source in a safe and
He says that overall this increasing use of open source is great news for developers, and for these bigger companies in general
While it enables them to take advantage of all the innovation going on in the open-source community, they need to make sure they are in
compliance.“The enterprise is really early on this journey, and that’s where we come in
We provide a platform to help the enterprise manage open-source usage at scale,” Wang explained
That involves three main pieces
First it tracks all of the open-source and third-party code being used inside a company
Next, it enforces licensing and security policy, and, finally, it has a reporting component
“We automate the mass reporting and compliance for all of the housekeeping that comes from using open source at scale,” he said.The
enterprise focus is relatively new for the company
It originally launched in 2017 as a tool for developers to track individual use of open source inside their programs
Wang saw a huge opportunity inside the enterprise to apply this same kind of capability inside larger organizations, which were hungry for
tools to help them comply with the myriad open-source licenses out there.“We found that there was no tooling out there that can manage the
scale and breadth across all the different enterprise use cases and all the really complex mission-critical code bases,” he said
What’s more, he found that where there were existing tools, they were vastly underutilized or didn’t provide broad enough coverage.The
company announced a $2.2 million seed round in 2017, and since then has grown from 10 to 40 employees
With today’s funding, that should increase as the company is expanding quickly
Wang reports that the startup has been tripling its revenue numbers and customer accounts year over year
The new money should help accelerate that growth and expand the product and markets it can sell into.
