Belfast-headquartered Cloudsmith has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global in landmark Northern Irish tech funding round.
The company, who specialise in software supply, have raised the largest ever Series A funding round in Northern Ireland. It is also the largest technology funding round in Northern Ireland since 2005, according to PitchBook data.
Other investors in the round include Shasta, Amaranthine, Sorenson and Leadout Capital as well as previous investors Frontline, MMC and Techstart. Docker CEO Scott Johnston, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar and Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar also participated in the round.
The Belfast-headquartered startup allows businesses to manage software via the cloud, eliminating the need to hire dedicated support staff to handle expensive and unwieldy on-premises solutions.
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Current on-premises solutions often require businesses to pay for dedicated staffing, VPNs and licences. Cloudsmith’s cloud-native solution eliminates the need for these expenses, vastly simplifying the system needed through its continuous packaging method.Cloudsmith’s software can automatically scan for vulnerabilities, helping businesses avoid introducing security flaws into their software supply chains.
Cloudsmith has customers globally in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Australia, including the Internet Systems Consortium, Carta and Font Awesome. US-based companies now make up 60% of the company’s revenues.
The company plans to use the new funding to hire 60 new employees and expand its US sales and engineering teams.
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Cloudsmith was founded in 2016 by former NYSE developers Alan Carson and Lee Skillen and announced a £2.1 million seed investment round led by Frontline Ventures, MMC Ventures and Techstart in 2019.
Commenting on the company, Vidya Raman, Principal at Sorenson Ventures, said: “While package management is by no means a new or flashy software space, it is a critical component of the software development lifecycle. The need for both cloud-native software development and secure software supply chains has resulted in the need to reinvent package management. That’s where Cloudsmith’s Continuous Packaging platform has come in and continues to lead that market. It is in the new world that Cloudsmith truly shines.”
This funding round supports Belfast’s position as becoming one of the UK’s most promising technology clusters. Tech Nation data released last year found that 26% of Belfast’s workforce is now employed in the digital technology economy. Belfast was also named one of the UK’s most promising emerging technology clusters by Tech Nation earlier this year.
Source: Written from press release.
