Tidelift, a startup that aims to “make open source software work better for developers," raised $25 million in a series B round co-led by General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.
The startup emerged out of stealth in May 2018 with backing from General Catalyst that led a $15M Series A round in the company. Tidelift’s CEO and co-founder, Donald Fischer was also a venture partner at General Catalyst. Its other co-founders include Havoc Pennington, a former senior software architect at Continuum Analytics; Jeremy Katz, a former staff software engineer at Google; and Luis Villa, a former Wikimedia Foundation employee.
The company's main product is the Tidelift Subscription, a single source for proactively maintained open source components, professional assurances around those components, and a software platform to track them. Its mission is to make open source software more robust, hence building a sustainable business model for it.
Tidelift's new funding will support its expansion to add more open source communities.
"Tidelift is filling an unmet need by connecting organizations that rely on open source with the maintainers who create the components they use every day," said Larry Bohn, managing director at General Catalyst in a statement. "The approach is working because it addresses acute pain points for both creators and users of open source and brings those groups together on a common business and technology platform."
