Open source is about to get even better, thanks to Tidelift, a Boston-based startup that gives software development teams professionally maintained, secured and licensed open source software.
The startup announced on Monday that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding to double its team in 2019 and accelerate the adoption of its new business model, which gives open source project teams a new platform and market for building profitable businesses around their projects.
At Tidelift, we are creating a community of people who want to build and support better software.”
The round was led by General Catalyst, Foundry Group and former Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.
Until Tidelift, many of the tens of thousands of open source components used in commercial applications didn’t have any form of commercial support. Tidelift gives development teams dependable open source software by allowing open source maintainers to make money doing good work.
In recent months, Tidelift has partnered with open source creators who collectively maintain thousands of open source packages, across the JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby language ecosystems, said Donald Fischer, co-founder and CEO.
“More than 35 million open source repositories now depend on packages that are included in the Tidelift Subscription,” Fischer said. “Now, building on this momentum and with additional resources on hand, we will be deepening our already extensive coverage of open source projects, while expanding to include additional open source communities.”
In September, Tidelift announced it had over $1 million reserved to pay open source maintainers for providing a standard set of security, maintenance and licensing assurances around their packages. Tidelift’s new funding will allow it to deepen its protection of open source projects and expand to include additional open source communities.
Fischer also said the financing will help double the team this year. About half of Tidelift’s current 20 employees are based in Boston, and they are actively hiring for multiple roles including software development, sales, business development, marketing, product management, design, developer relations, human resources and customer success.
“At Tidelift, we are creating a community of people who want to build and support better software,” Fischer said. “During 2019, we’ll be scaling up the model to cover more and more of the open source landscape.
 copy 2.png)
