FOSSA Raises $8.5 Million in Series A Funding, Led by Bain Capital Ventures and Costanoa Ventures

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FOSSA, the open source management company, today announced that it 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.

In 2011, Gartner estimated that open source adoption in the enterprise was below 20%.^[1] Today, approximately 90% of organizations use open source software,^[2] and according to a recent Red Hat survey, 99% of IT professionals indicate that open source software is somewhat to extremely important in the enterprise.^[3] There are several benefits that make open source software attractive to the enterprise including cost, speed and flexibility, among others. 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. 

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.

"We built FOSSA as an open source project with developers in mind," stated Kevin Wang, 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. By initially focusing on developers and the complexities of open source compliance, we have gained a deep understanding of enterprise open source management requirements. We're excited to continue creating a solution that quickly adapts to different enterprise processes and expand our offering into vulnerability management and code quality."

Early FOSSA adopter, Zendesk, states, "FOSSA enabled new, collaborative workflows across our engineering and legal teams that weren't possible with our legacy tools and processes. With FOSSA, I use 99% less of my engineering team's time and only require their support on issues that matter."

FOSSA has over 500,000 downloads of its open source dependency analyzer from some of the most prevalent open source projects in the world such as Docker and Kafka, and several technology forward companies such as Uber, Twitter and Verizon Media. FOSSA is capitalizing on this rapid customer adoption and success to approach open source software management differently.

"FOSSA is exciting because it is changing the way companies deal with the necessary evils of utilizing open source: licensing and compliance management," stated Salil Deshpande, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "Older traditional solutions have focused too heavily on security and not on the needs of the developer, including flexibility and efficiency. As an early investor in FOSSA, I'm thrilled to be a part of the company's next phase of product and company growth."

About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Costanoa Ventures
Costanoa Ventures backs tenacious and thoughtful founders who change how business gets done. Costanoa seeks to be a long-term partner to entrepreneurs building durable companies leveraging data to solve complex business problems. For more information, please visit www.costanoavc.com.

About FOSSA
Founded in 2017, FOSSA is the world's first Modern Open Source Management platform. Designed for development and legal teams alike, FOSSA provides component intelligence, continuous compliance, and cross-team collaboration solutions that enables organizations including Uber, Twitter, Zendesk and Verizon Media to quickly identify and mitigate risks, improve engineering efficiency and accelerate time to market. For more information, please visit www.fossa.com.

^[1] "Market Trend: Open Source Adoption in the SMB Market, 2011," Laurie F. Wurster, Jie Zhang, Vivek Roy, Jonesh Pradhan, Gartner, November 8, 2011.
^[2] "As Open-Source Adoption Skyrockets in Enterprise, Linux Addresses Ease of Use," Marlene Den Bleyker, SiliconANGLE, 2 June 2017. 
^[3] "The State of Enterprise Open Source," a Red Hat Report by Illuminas, April 2019.

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SOURCE FOSSA