I'm pleased to announce that we've raised an 8.7M Series A with Josh Stein of DFJ leading the investment and joining our board. John (cofounder and LaunchDarkly CTO) and I are thrilled about the next chapter for LaunchDarkly, the leading feature flag management platform.
Our A funding is a marker to reflect on our progress since we announced our seed round in June 2015. Then, we were a team of four with our product in private beta. Now, we serve billions of feature flags (daily) to amazing customers like AppDirect, CircleCI, Lanetix and Upserve. Microsoft recommended LaunchDarkly for feature flagging, and Atlassian showcases how we help them do DevOps right. As a former Product Director at TripIt, I initially thought our target market would be mobile app developers. I was right - mobile app developers do love us for how we can help them iterate faster. However, the market is so much bigger - LaunchDarkly is feature flag management for literally anyone who codes. ANYONE. Whether that team is reducing risk, managing subscription plans or microservices - we can help them. Part of our funding will go towards hiring more amazing engineers to continue to build feature flag management. We're hiring!
We believe firmly that using feature flags allows software teams to build better products, faster. Really what we allow teams to do is separate business logic (who gets what, when, how) from code. There are amazing benefits not just for developers, but for operations, product, marketing and sales, who suddenly can control functionality. As such, we have literally written the book on how to feature flag. [I've also written on the wrong way to feature flag] We believe so passionately in the overall movement, that we also open-sourced the book on GitHub. Want to contribute? Open a PR! Excited about helping evangelize feature flags? We're hiring!
One of the funnest parts of founding a startup is not just building a product, creating a category, and hearing from happy customers - it's building an amazing team. I am so proud of how much the original eight of us have achieved. But as we continue to grow, it's clear that we need to have dedicated resources on making sure we're providing the best customer experience. One of my favorite customer emails read “I can't believe that the sweet lady who answered the phone and helped me was actually the CEO.” I'm pleased that Russ Thau, former VP of Sales Intercom, is joining us to build out a team of sales, support and customer success to help our customers get the most out of feature flagging. Interested in joining? We're hiring!
I hope you see a persistent pattern - we're looking forward to continuing to build a great product, customer experience and team. A favorite customer email was from Behalf, who said they enjoyed being on the journey with us. Thank you to our customers, team and investors, and I hope you are as excited about our next chapter as John and I are.
