2019 has been a breakout year for LaunchDarkly, and I'm pleased to announce 4 million in additional funding. John Kodumal and I started LaunchDarkly five years ago with a vision to make it easier for software teams (marketing, product, engineering, QA, ops, sales) to quickly and fearlessly build and manage features. We both had seen the power of feature management from our years at TripIt and Atlassian. We wanted everyone to be able to:
- Run a beta program
- Dark launch and release to hand-picked early adopters
- Manage microservices
- Control subscription levels
- Test in production to get real world feedback at scale
- Manage add-ons and upgrades
Today, LaunchDarkly has 700+ customers worldwide, and we serve 200 billion (with a B) feature flags daily. I read every NPS survey, and I'm personally touched by how we've improved the life for developers, product managers, QA, sales & marketing. In their own words… LaunchDarkly:
- “It has single-handedly changed how my team is able to work on our application. I've demoed it across the company to other teams repeatedly. It is a life changer.”
- “Provides an extremely valuable capability for increasingly agile software teams.”
- “Is an essential tool for developing and testing new features”
- “Empowers the entire team to be able to enable features in our product.”
And we are just getting started. If the world is increasingly run by software, the need for LaunchDarkly is growing. I have been continually surprised at the depth and breadth of how we can improve the life of our customers' customers.
We have household names like BMW, IBM, Atlassian and QVC, who use LaunchDarkly to build and provide better software. I've gotten to watch cutting edge companies like Invision, Procore, Contentful, Troops.ai, People.ai, and FuboTV who have used us for years as they scale. And then we have stalwarts like Pitney Bowes or Providence Health Systems who care about not just about making it easier to build better software with less risk, but also about creating a better experience for their customers.
I'm extremely happy to welcome Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners to Team LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly will use the money raised in this round of funding to continue to invest in our enterprise feature management platform, as well as scale our marketing and sales to help every software organization more effectively manage their software.
Thanks to all of our 700+ customers who have trusted us to help them build better software —and with less than 1% churn, I think it's safe to say these are all happy customers! Thanks to the entire team at LaunchDarkly who help our customers each and every day, and especially John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly CTO & Co-Founder.
I'm very excited about the future—we are hiring! We are hosting our first annual conference, Trajectory on April 8th and 9th in Oakland, where we'll bring together innovators who are leading the charge for better development and release processes. And if you're not using LaunchDarkly yet, you can sign up for a free trial here, or let us know if you want a demo.
