- FOSSA provides a platform that helps enterprises manage and maximize open source use at scale
- It will use the investment to accelerate product development, expand enterprise features and drive overall corporate growth
US-based open source management company FOSSA has closed a $8.5 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners.
This brings FOSSA’s total amount of funding to $11 million. The investment will be used to accelerate product development, expand enterprise features and drive overall corporate growth, the company said.
The company announced a $2.2 million seed round in 2017, also led by Bain Capital Ventures. Since then it has grown from 10 to 40 employees.
FOSSA provides the technology to help organizations understand what’s in their code and automate license tracking/compliance without slowing development.
Rise in open source adoption
In 2011, Gartner estimated that open source adoption in the enterprise was below 20 percent. Today, approximately 90 percent of organizations use open source software, and according to a recent Red Hat survey, 99 percent of IT professionals indicate that open source software is somewhat to extremely important in the enterprise.
There are several benefits that make open source software attractive to the enterprise including cost, speed and flexibility. However, most enterprises don’t have a formal program to ensure effective management of the various licensing, security and quality issues when utilizing open source software. And those that do, rely on a painstaking process of manual code reviews and spreadsheets.
FOSSA, in its recently issued statement, noted that the biggest blocker to effective open source software management is the number of bespoke development practices and approval workflows that exist within the same company.
Unlike traditional offerings, FOSSA focuses on automating the workflow of open source management both within and outside of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This enables enterprises to quickly identify and mitigate risks, improve engineering efficiency and accelerate time to market, the company said.
A developer-centric solution
“We built FOSSA as an open source project with developers in mind,” stated Kevin Wang, Founder/CEO of FOSSA.
“Everyone uses open source differently. We created FOSSA as a developer-centric, flexible compliance solution allowing developers to focus on innovation, not license management,” Wang added.
FOSSA provides component intelligence, continuous compliance and cross-team collaboration solutions that enable organizations to quickly identify and mitigate risks, improve engineering efficiency and accelerate time to market. FOSSA adopters include Uber, Twitter, Zendesk and Verizon Media.
