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Open-source software support provider Tidelift raises $25M
Open-source software company Tidelift Inc. is heading into the new year with renewed momentum after snagging a $25 million round of funding.
The Series B round announced today was led by the investment firms General Catalyst and Foundry Group, as well as former Red Hat Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Matthew Szulik. The three investors had all participated in Tidelift’s previous $15 million Series A round in May.
Tidelift said it will use the new funds to grow what it says is a unique business model for open-source software. It enables its customers to rely on the core developers of the projects they use to provide professional support services.
The way Tidelift’s model works is that customers pay for a subscription that entitles them to enterprise-grade support, similar to the kind of commercial support subscriptions sold by companies such as Red Hat Inc. and Docker Inc., for example. However, rather than provide the support itself, Tidelift effectively outsources this work to the developers who maintain and upgrade the software concerned.
The benefits are twofold: Customers get professional support at a much cheaper rate, while the unpaid developers who deliver the open-source software have a way to get compensated for their work.
Another key benefit of Tidelift’s model is that it can provide support services for a wide range of smaller open-source software projects that are not supported by any major company.
Indeed, Tidelift said its subscription covers support for “hundreds” of open-source software packages across the JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, .NET and Ruby language ecosystems.
“We’ve reached a crucial turning point for open source,” Tidelift co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Donald Fischer said in a statement. “Heartbleed, Equifax and the recent spate of open source supply chain attacks are all symptoms of a systemic underinvestment in maintenance of widely used open-source packages.”
The company said one of its main aims going forward is to expand the range of open-source software projects it supports.
Image: Tidelift
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