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DevOps platform JFrog has raised $165 million in a series D round of funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Battery Ventures, Spark Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, and Geodesic Capital.
The company hasn’t revealed an exact valuation following this raise, but JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim did confirm to VentureBeat that it’s now worth “way north” of the $1 billion mark.
Founded out of Israel in 2008, JFrog’s two core products — Artifactory and Bintray — serve as an automated toolset for developers to manage and distribute software releases. Its self-stated mission is to provide an “end-to-end universal repository solution” for binaries, or software packages.
“Software updates need to flow seamlessly, like water running through pipes,” said Ben Haim. “This is what we call the ‘liquid software vision.’ From Git to Kubernetes and from your data center to the edge, software updates must flow anytime, anywhere with minimal effort. The JFrog platform will enable continuous software updates and propel us to become the company behind all software updates in the universe.”
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Above: JFrog CEO and cofounder Shlomi Ben Haim
Prior to now, JFrog had raised $61.5 million in funding, and with another $165 million in the bank, it said that it plans to expand rapidly into new markets and “accelerate both organic and inorganic growth,” which basically means that it’s planning to buy some companies. As it happens, JFrog acquired Israeli software development consulting and training company Trainologic just last week, its fourth acquisition since its inception.
Big bucks
The global DevOps market is expected to grow from a $3 billion industry today to a $10 billion industry in 2023, according to a recent Markets and Markets report.
“Every organization realizes that to remain competitive, their software solutions need to be built and released in some cases multiple times a day,” Ben Haim said. “End users and consumers want and require updates now. This means developers are building the world at a breakneck pace, and DevOps allows them to operate in the fast lane.”
Last week, GitLab raised $100 million from big-name investors including Iconiq, GV, and Khosla, attaining a valuation of $1.1 billion. Elsewhere, Microsoft is currently in the process of acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion, while Atlassian — which is best known for its issue-tracking software Jira — is performing admirably on Wall Street, with its shares currently sitting at $96, up more than 150 percent on last year.
“DevOps is truly just at the cusp of spilling into the mainstream, as every company — new or established — is now a software company trying to operate with this required speed and scale, and they’re looking for communities and technologies to make sense of all their development methods, software assets — open source and commercial — technology types, delivery pipelines, tools, and processes that are required,” continued Ben Haim. “We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg, which is why you’re noticing so much market activity.”
Indeed, if every company is effectively becoming a software company, this means that developers are in high demand, and developers want to work with the best tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). JFrog’s position in the DevOps market sees it both compete with and partner with some of the bigger players in the space.
“We provide developers with the choice they deserve by being a universal platform, supporting the broadest range of technologies with no lock-in,” Ben Haim said. “We then invest heavily in integration across our ecosystem. This means that many DevOps-centric companies will be both competitive with us and partners of ours at the same time.”
JFrog said that more than 5 million developers use JFrog Artifactory “as their system of record” for building and releasing software, with support for hybrid, on-premises, and multiple cloud platforms. Since its $50 million series C raise in 2016, the company said that it has grown its sales by 500 percent, and it now has 4,500 clients including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Snap, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, and Airbus.
