Infield recently announced $3 million in funding for its comprehensive open-source dependency manager. Foundation Capital led the funding round with participation of YCombinator and Firsthand Alliance. Adam Gross (former CEO of Heroku), Jonathan Siddarth (founder of Turing), and Austin Ogilvie (founder of Thoropass) also joined as investors. And Infield makes open-source dependency upgrades safer and more efficient.
Software organizations utilize hundreds of open-source packages, from small utilities to whole platforms. And the average software application depends on over 500 open-source components. These packages and dependencies can get updated frequently, fixing security issues or improving reliability and performance. However, installing all dependency updates in the right order can be a headache. Some of these updates include “breaking changes”, which can cause systems to stop working unless other changes or updates are made first.
Infield is the first open-source dependency update manager that is focused on identifying breaking changes. And Infield employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to ingest changelogs and spot any signs that a particular update could cause issues, combined with the company’s deep database of popular open-source packages and users’ experiences in upgrading them.
Infield manages the details of dependency updates, remediates breaking changes where required, and determines the optimal order for updates. After being connected for the first time, Infield quickly scans a company’s dependencies and creates the pull requests needed to get up to date, even if the update backlog is months or years long.
Steve and Allison Pike, former CTO and COO of SevenFifty, and Andrew Lenehan, a second-time founder, founded Infield. Steve was a consultant helping companies manage their dependency upgrades upon realizing that a software solution could help automate the process. The remote-first company already has several paying customers.
KEY QUOTES:
“Engineers want to be running on the latest, newest open source versions, but it’s just so much to keep track of. Sometimes there are dozens of updates a week and you don’t know which ones are important and which might cause problems. On the other hand, the longer you wait, the harder it gets as the dependency updates multiply.”
“Open source dependency updates matter for security, compliance and performance, but they’re also a part of building a world-class engineering culture. Engineers want their systems to be running the latest versions, and get frustrated when the backlog starts to pile up. Infield allows developers, DevOps and DevSecOps to focus on their core jobs, without having to worry about an update breaking their production systems.”
— Steve Pike, founder and CEO of Infield
“As software architectures become increasingly complex, keeping software dependencies up to date has become both a critical need and a growing pain point for companies. Infield’s fully managed approach to dependencies, updates and upgrades, using AI to detect and mitigate breaking changes, frees engineers from a constant, frustrating task. Steve’s deep and personal experience in this problem space has shaped his exceptionally clear vision for a future where software engineers get to focus on software creation, not software management, and we’re excited to partner with him, Allison and Andy.”
— Lauri Moore, partner at Foundation Capital
