I’m delighted to announce that LaunchDarkly has raised $200 million in additional funding.
John Kodumal and I founded LaunchDarkly seven years ago with our firm belief that software powers the world, and LaunchDarkly powers all teams to deliver and control their software. Today, our funding announcement also coincides with LaunchDarkly’s appearance on the 2021 Forbes Cloud 100.
We are beyond excited about these new developments and, as always, our focus remains on improving the lives of our customers, and our customers’ customers.
Currently, we have over 2,000 customers all over the world using LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform to deliver value and eliminate risk. We have not just the expected e-commerce and streaming entertainment customers at the forefront of modern development, but also those organizations that have been working tirelessly to shift their business models to being powered by software: banks, healthcare, car manufacturers, and even cash registers.
After starting my career as an engineer and product manager, one of my great joys now is hearing our customers’ stories about how LaunchDarkly has improved their own lives through three lenses: technical value, business value, and personal value.
Technical value
LaunchDarkly’s strength and resilience is world class. Our platform supports more than 20 programming languages, so no matter what you’re doing—from a 3D printer to a mobile game to streaming a show—we have you covered. For scale, LaunchDarkly serves peaks of over 20 trillion (with a "t") features flags in a day.
Business Value
As more organizations prioritize providing exceptional, always-on digital experiences, they’re also looking for better control over what they put into the world.
We’re seeing how customers are using feature management to continuously deliver value to their users, without risking significant downtime:
- TrueCar, a leading digital automotive marketplace, used LaunchDarkly to migrate hundreds of sites safely and with no disruption.
- Northern Trust, a preeminent global financial institution, can release 10x more frequently to their own customers with LaunchDarkly.
- SeeSaw, a classroom app used in more than three out of four schools in the US and over 150 countries, can now innovate safely to deliver the best experience to students all over the world.
Personal value
I started LaunchDarkly out of my own frustrations with botched, late, buggy releases that were hard to maintain. LaunchDarkly allows customers to safely release features to subsets of customers, with rollbacks built in.
LaunchDarkly also provides finely-tuned precision to what features a customer has access to long term. That’s why we call it feature management—we truly allow our customers to manage features in a way that changes how they think about building software. And with this safety net for innovation, there’s less stress and fear, and more confidence.
“Releases used to be nerve-wracking,” says Chris Guidry, VP of Engineering at O’Reilly. “When a production issue occurred, we’d have 10 people sitting on a call together, all typing code at the exact same time, trying to fix the issue. It was stressful. LaunchDarkly makes our releases boring. That’s exactly what we want.”
I love boring releases—where customers can concentrate on value—rather than push-and-pray launches. And I also love that I can buy a car with TrueCar, manage my investments with Northern Trust, or plan a vacation with Hawaiian Airlines, and know that their teams can concentrate on providing value, instead of worrying about software infrastructure.
So what’s next?
Team LaunchDarkly has over 300 employees worldwide, and we’re growing. We are currently hiring for many roles, both in the US and worldwide, as we evangelize feature management and support our customers. If you’re interested in building a category-creating product with us, check out our careers page.
And of course, we will continue to invest in a world-class, scalable, feature management platform, which includes integrations with the services you’re already using to power your business today and in the future.
A huge thank you to everyone at Team LaunchDarkly—the employees, our 2,000 customers, and our investors who power LaunchDarkly!
