LaunchDarkly was founded in 2014 in Oakland, California, by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, to solve a clear problem in modern software delivery: Teams were releasing code faster in the cloud, but they still lacked safe, practical control over what happened after deployment.

We set out to make feature management accessible beyond the small group of companies that had built homegrown systems. Over time, we expanded from helping developers soft-launch features to giving product, marketing, and business teams more control over rollouts and customer experiences as well.

Today, LaunchDarkly is the runtime control layer for the AI era of software development, reflecting how we’ve evolved from pioneering feature management into a broader platform for controlling software releases, experimentation, observability, and AI agent behavior in production. We now serve more than 5,500 customers, including roughly a quarter of the Fortune 500.

Our vision is to create a world in which every AI-powered release is safe and unceremonious.