FOSSA Raises $2.2 Million to Help Companies Manage Open Source Licenses; Releases Product

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- FOSSA, the company behind the modern open source management and license compliance tool, today announced a seed financing of $2.2 million led by Bain Capital Ventures. The round includes participation from numerous angel investors including Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, YouTube CTO/Co-founder Steve Chen, Skype CTO/Co-Founder Jaan Tallinn, Cloudera CTO/Co-Founder Amr Awadallah and Tinder CMO/Co-Founder Justin Mateen.  Beginning today, FOSSA's product is freely available in public beta here as well as a "for Business" offering following a 12 month private beta with Fortune 500 companies.

In the era of open source, the average modern application now uses code shared by thousands of third-party developers each with unique licenses and terms of use. Many of these developers ask for credit and attribution, but some are copyrighted, require commercial agreements or have terms that are harmful for business.  With the complexity of modern code, there's no easy way to track how code is shared or what is getting used, leading to layers of unknown license obligations surfaced to software development companies during releases, audits, sales and other due diligence.

"Modern development trends are adding profound speed and risk to software development … automated license management is no longer just nice to have, it's dangerous to not have it," said Salil Deshpande, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures. "The only modern, accessible and enterprise-ready solution we saw was FOSSA."

FOSSA provides the technology to help organizations understand what's in their code and automate license tracking/compliance without slowing development. Replacing manual systems, FOSSA automatically scans code to analyze license data, generates disclosures/attribution and surfaces issues all on a continuous basis.  This allows companies to automate compliance in the background, letting developers write software safely, quickly and in real-time without introducing layers of people and process.

"In a world where you no longer write or own the majority of your software products, you need a way to take control and trust your code again," said Kevin Wang, Founder/CEO of FOSSA, "Today, development keeps getting faster, and you can't afford to slow it down with expensive legal audits and months of manual review.  With FOSSA, you can continuously stay compliant, letting you build software as fast as possible with a process you can trust in the background."

Many leaders in cutting-edge industries including SolarCity and SmartThings are among the company's paying customers.  In addition, organizations like npm and the Linux Foundation are partnered with FOSSA to develop custom integrations and channels.

"FOSSA is just the kind of compliance tool the industry needs.  It's easy to use, understandable, and helps manage open source compliance risks in real world environments.", says Heather Meeker, a partner/attorney at O'Melveny & Myers, open source licensing expert, author of the Mozilla Public License and the book "Open (Source) for Business."  "Open source compliance is an absolute necessity in today's IT world.  The industry is demanding a new generation of tools."

The team behind FOSSA also created and maintains tl;drLegal -- a popular standard resource on open source licensing which has reached over 1M developers and adoption by the Open Source Initiative. 

FOSSA is now available in a public beta and is being introduced for businesses in consumer technology, enterprise software, energy, embedded devices/IoT and more.

For more information, visit: www.fossa.io or twitter @getfossa

Resources:
FOSSA: http://fossa.io 
FOSSA's public beta: https://app.fossa.io 
FOSSA Customer Story: http://fossa.io/customers/smartthings
More on the Announcement: https://medium.com/fossa/announcing-fossa-public-beta-funding-8cf56cf8ebc6

About FOSSA.
FOSSA is headquartered in San Francisco. The company's service enables software teams to continuously track and comply with open source licenses inside their development workflow.  FOSSA also maintains the popular open source licensing resource tl;drLegal, which has reached over 1M developers.  FOSSA is backed by several prominent angel investors and venture funds including Bain Capital Ventures and the founders of Skype, YouTube, Cloudera, SalesForce and Tinder. Founded by Kevin Wang, a member of Peter Thiel's '20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship' program for young entrepreneurs.  For more information visit fossa.io.

Contact:
Michael Ratkevic
miker@blackswanmedia  

SOURCE FOSSA