- LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform company used for building software faster, announced it raised $54 million
LaunchDarkly — a feature management platform company used for building software faster founded by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal in 2014 — announced that it has raised $54 million in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners from their Century Fund with participation from Threshold Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Uncork Capital, Vertex Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $130 million thus far.
The funding will be used for addressing the surge in demand that the company has seen for its feature management platform. Some of LaunchDarkly’s customers include IBM, TrueCar, and fuboTV. These brands are using LaunchDarkly for control feature lifecycles, eliminate risks from deployment processes, and increase efficiency throughout development cycles.
“LaunchDarkly pioneered the category of feature management and has quickly become the de facto standard to reliably deploy software at scale,” said Ethan Kurzweil, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We are excited to support Edith, John and the LaunchDarkly team as they invest in transforming the way that software is built and launched, allowing companies to be more nimble and product-driven.”
Last year, the company served over 1 trillion features flags a day for more than a thousand customers, an increase of 500% over 2018. This spike was driven by the increasing pressure companies are experiencing for moving quickly, innovating faster, and delivering exceptional user experiences. This demand is expected to continue as more teams strive to deliver these results without sacrificing quality or efficiency.
“Dynamic feature management is rapidly becoming the next big innovation in software development, allowing companies of all sizes to ship code faster with less risk,” added Josh Stein, Managing Partner of Threshold Ventures. “It’s been amazing to see the impact LaunchDarkly is having, and we’re excited to see how the platform and the team continue to grow in 2020.”
Last year, LaunchDarkly held its first conference, which was based out of downtown Oakland and is called Trajectory Conference. At the event, attendees heard talks from industry leaders from organizations such Slack, Microsoft, Datadog, AWS, and IBM. And LaunchDarkly will host the Trajectory Conference again from April 29 to April 30, 2020.
Along with offering features like Experimentation (enabling teams to test production ideas), Data Export (empowering teams to extract data into external analysis tools), and Mobile Monthly Active User Packs (feature management on mobile devices), the LaunchDarkly team also added multiple new languages such as Roku and C/C++ and enhanced integrations with GitHub, HashiCorp, and Slack.
“LaunchDarkly is creating an entirely new category called feature management,” explained Scott Raney, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “Edith, John, and the team are solving some of the most difficult problems developers and product teams face and we couldn’t be more excited to continue on this journey!”
Going forward, LaunchDarkly will also continue to invest in expanding its team. And last year, LaunchDarkly grew its team in its Oakland headquarters, opened a sales and customer success hub in New York City, and hired sales, customer success, and developer advocates across North America. This year, LaunchDarkly will open sales offices in Sydney, Australia, and an engineering hub in London.
