Nix Management Company flox Raises $16.5 Million

By Dan Anderson ● Feb 8, 2023
  • flox announced it raised $16.5 million in Series A funding. These are the details.

flox – a company that is bringing the power of Nix to everyone – recently announced it has raised $16.5 million in its Series A led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing total funding to date to $27 million. flox was incubated at DESCOvery, which is the D. E. Shaw group’s venture studio, and its early backers include Addition and Hetz Ventures. The notable angel investors include Thomas Dohmke, CEO at Github; Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk; and James Turnbull, former CTO at Microsoft for Startups and VP at Docker, currently CTO at Sotheby’s.

The company also introduced its new open-source flox platform and is expected to release its enterprise platform later this year. And flox expands on Nix’s unique approach to package management and system configuration to provide convenience, collaboration, and control throughout the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Plus the company is helping developers and enterprises realize the value of Nix with new and powerful capabilities by providing portable, fully-isolated development; test and production environments; a tailored catalog of software packages with flox; and tooling for managing the entire SDLC.

CEO Ron Efroni is a member of the NixOS Foundation board, and several flox team members are Nix contributors. And with the goal of more widespread adoption of Nix, the team will continue to contribute, support, and promote the Nix project and community.

The way software is built is changing. And larger code bases, complex software dependencies, cloud-native technologies, and massive security breaches are just a few examples of the reasons organizations are re-evaluating the way they build and deploy software. Plus they have started looking beyond containers at tools and platforms that can improve their build and development process, increase efficiency, and result in higher quality code, reproducibility, and visibility into their stack – in any environment.

flox essentially enables organizations to adopt and implement Nix at scale by providing omni-platform developer, test, and production environments defined (and managed) as code. And with flox, it is easy to share environments and packages across teams, machines, individuals, and organizations while integrating into existing workflows.

In the areas of Security and Compliance, flox provides complete visibility into the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for applications used in production environments, providing the ultimate visibility into the software stack and enabling real-time vulnerability management and detection without scanning.

KEY QUOTES:

“Building and deploying software in a reproducible, secure manner is perhaps the biggest challenge facing developers today. flox recognizes the innovations within Nix to solve this challenge yet those challenges come with the cost of a steep learning curve. By creating an easy-to-use platform around Nix, flox supercharges productivity for developers everywhere while also making their software more secure.”

— Aaron Jacobson, Partner at NEA

“We created flox to give developers better collaboration and control over their development lifecycle, including improved automation over production releases, reduced operational risk and increased productivity. We recognized the vast power of Nix but knew there was a market need to take developer tools to the next level, providing versioned environments-as-code that could be consistently released, updated and maintained and that could offer improved security and efficiency. We couldn’t be more excited to offer this to developers and bring this to market now.”

— Ron Efroni, CEO and co-founder at flox

“flox helps developers and enterprises innovate better and deploy software securely. We’re excited to partner with Ron and his talented team as they continue to expand and roll out their new open source platform to bring Nix to everyone.”

— Todd Arfman of Addition

“flox was originally built within the D. E. Shaw group to help our developers adopt Nix at scale. The platform is still used at the D. E. Shaw group today, and we’re excited about the value that we believe flox can bring to developers everywhere.”

— Ron Davidson, co-head of DESCOvery, the D. E. Shaw group’s venture studio