Unleash, the business name of Bricks Software AS, said today it has raised $35 million in a Series B funding to help enterprises manage the operational risks that come with artificial intelligence-accelerated software development.

The Oslo-based firm sells a commercial version of its namesake open-source feature management platform developed by Chief Technology Officer Ivar Østhus. The new financing brings total funding to $51.5 million. The proceeds will be used to accelerate product innovation and global expansion as enterprises grapple with the governance challenges created by AI-generated code, said Chief Executive Egil Østhus.

AI tools have dramatically speeded up software development, enabling organizations to ship more code faster. But Unleash asserts that acceleration has outpaced traditional governance and release controls. It cited research published last fall by Google LLC’s DevOps Research and Assessment group, which found that a 25% rise in AI adoption correlates with a 7% drop in software stability.

“When AI-generated code is in production, and something breaks, you need the ability to diagnose, fix and recover immediately,” Egil Østhus said. “The Unleash open-source FeatureOps platform gives you that control, and we’ve proven it works in the world’s most highly regulated industries.”

Governance layer

Unleash defines FeatureOps as an operational layer that sits on top of DevOps practices. While DevOps focuses on moving code into production quickly and reliably, FeatureOps governs how features are exposed to users once they are live, including the ability to roll out changes incrementally, measure their impact across technical and business metrics, and quickly disable problematic functionality.

“You’ve got engineers shipping faster than ever, but also more stressed than ever because they have less visibility into what’s actually running in production,” said Ivar Østhus. “We give them that visibility so they can still move fast but know exactly what’s live and can release it or kill it in seconds.”

The platform is built around feature flags, a software development technique that acts as a sort of if/else statement in code, allowing developers to enable or disable functionality at runtime without redeployment. That enables what the company calls “surgical rollback,” in which a single faulty feature can be disabled without pulling back an entire release.

“The idea is to have a safety net that allows developers to take advantage of AI for faster experimentation, but also have the confidence to know that they don’t need to release new features to everybody but can validate on a smaller set of users,” Ivar Østhus said.

Rapid growth

Unleash claims its open-source FeatureOps platform is the world’s most popular, with more than 13,000 GitHub stars and more than 40 million downloads. The company said it has doubled annual recurring revenue each year since raising a Series A round in 2022 and has more than 500 paying customers, including Prudential Financial Inc., Lloyds Banking Group PLC, Wayfair Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd.

“Developers are pushing huge amounts of AI-assisted code, and reviews are moving to production quicker than ever,” Wayfair Site Reliability Engineer Kiriti Dhanai said at Unleash’s recent user conference. “Speed is up, but reliability is down. AI is accelerating risk because it is almost impossible for QA teams to keep up. This is where FeatureOps comes in.”

Unleash plans to use the new capital to expand its capabilities in autonomous end-to-end feature lifecycle management and boost marketing and sales.

“The best time to raise money is when you don’t need money,” said Egil Østhus. “We are having great momentum. This allows us to accelerate our go-to-market activities and take a bigger market share more quickly.”

The funding round was led by One Peak Partners LLP, with participation from existing investors Spark Capital Partners LLC, Frontline Ventures Management Company Ltd. and Firstminute Capital LLP.

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