Tidelift Raises $25M for Open Source, Led By Former Red Hat Boss Matthew Szulik

BOSTON -- Tidelift today announced $25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the adoption of its new business model for open source. General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik co-led the funding round.

Tidelift gives organizations the security, licensing, and maintenance guarantees they need for the open source software components their applications depend on. The heart of the solution is the Tidelift Subscription -- a single source for proactively maintained open source components, professional assurances around those components, and a software platform to track them.

The Tidelift Subscription is backed by the people who know these software projects the best -- the open source developers who create and maintain them. Tidelift subscribers are assured that the thousands of critical open source packages their businesses depend on are maintained to a professional-grade standard, while participating open source creators are directly paid for making that possible.

"We've reached a crucial turning point for open source," said Tidelift co-founder and CEO Donald Fischer. "Heartbleed, Equifax, and the recent spate of open source supply chain attacks are all symptoms of a systemic under-investment in maintenance of widely used open source packages. The stakes are now too high, and it is no longer an option to accept the status quo. Tidelift has built, and now we're scaling, a model that pays open source maintainers to do their important work even better by connecting them to the many software development teams who rely on their contributions."

"Discourse has become a Tidelift subscriber not only to benefit from professional-grade assurances around software that's integral to our business, but to constructively partner with the individuals who create those packages," said Erlend Sogge Heggen, VP of Community at Discourse. "Paying the maintainers is something we know is effective, and it's also an urgent priority for our business, since it ensures the technology we rely on is maintained and dependable."

Momentum behind new business model for open source
In September, Tidelift announced it had over $1 million committed to pay maintainers for providing a standard set of security, maintenance, and licensing assurances around their packages. Hundreds of packages have since been added to the Tidelift Subscription, across the JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby language ecosystems. An estimated 35 million of the most commonly used open source repositories are now dependent on packages that are included in the Tidelift Subscription.

Tidelift's new funding will allow it to further deepen its already extensive coverage of open source projects, while expanding to include additional open source communities.

Tidelift