Tidelift, a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2022, today announced $27 million in Series C funding led by Dorilton Ventures, with Kaiser Permanente and Atlassian Ventures joining existing investors General Catalyst and Foundry Group. Dorilton Ventures’ Daniel Freeman has joined the Tidelift Board of Directors as part of the transaction.
This new investment comes at a time when open source software health and security have become a top priority for organisations and governments worldwide. Recent software supply chain threats, such as the Log4Shell vulnerability, have prompted organisations to reconsider how they manage the health and security of the open source software that powers the majority of their applications.
Furthermore, in order to meet the directives of the White House Cybersecurity Executive Order, the US Government is leading a coordinated, multi-agency effort to improve software security standards. This puts additional pressure on organisations seeking to comply with these new standards in order to continue selling to the government, such as creating software bills of materials (SBOMs) listing all of their application components while also vouching for their security and provenance, including open source elements.
Rising demand from organizations increasingly reliant on open source
As more organisations use open source in their applications, the challenge of keeping it well maintained and secure at scale grows. The Tidelift approach to open source management is being adopted by industries such as healthcare, finance, technology, and government. Fannie Mae, Bloomberg, Hughes, Adobe, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IEEE, the United States Geological Survey, and the United States Air Force are among the new and expanding Tidelift customers.
The company pays the independent open source maintainers behind thousands of open source components to ensure their projects meet enterprise standards now and in the future, which is a key component of Tidelift’s model. With no cap on potential earnings, the more subscribers who use an open source component, the more its maintainers are paid.
“Tidelift’s unique approach marries the needs of enterprise application development teams and open source maintainers in a win-win way where everyone benefits,” said Daniel Freeman, General Partner at Dorilton Ventures. “We’re looking forward to being a part of realizing the Tidelift vision of making open source work better for everyone.”
