$25m to scale Tidelift for open source creators and users

Seven months ago, we announced $15m of Series A funding for Tidelift, with the mission of making open source work better—for everyone.

Today, we’re announcing an additional $25m of Series B funding, co-led by General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.

What does this mean for you? Read on.

More for open source creators

Tidelift makes it possible for open source creators to get paid for doing the work they love. By delivering the support and assurances that professional teams who use their software need, creators can get a new source of income to support their work.

In September we opened the doors for any open source project to sign up to participate in Tidelift, surpassing $1m in guaranteed income for many projects in the JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP communities.

In the few months since that announcement, open source creators—both individuals and teams—who collectively maintain thousands of open source packages including Apache Struts, Nokogiri, Mongoose, Setuptools, Project Lombok, Joda-Time, Pillow, PromiseKit, and Beautiful Soup, have joined alongside the maintainers of projects like Vue, Material-UI, Babel, Gulp, Fabric, Active Admin, Doctrine, and StandardJS to participate in Tidelift. More than 35 million open source repositories now depend on packages that are included in the Tidelift Subscription.

Now, building on this momentum and with additional resources on hand, we will redouble our efforts to extend our already extensive coverage of open source projects, while expanding to partner with additional open source communities.

Featured packages include

More for Tidelift subscribers

For professional teams building applications with open source components, we offer the Tidelift Subscription, which provides commercial-grade security updates, maintenance, and legal assurances for the open source projects you use, provided directly by the experts who created them.

With comprehensive coverage of open source communities including JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP, we’ve received tremendous interest in the Tidelift Subscription from organizations of all sizes.

Now, with the resources provided by our additional funding, we’ll invest in additional product development to provide even more direct value to our subscribers, amplify our marketing, sales, and customer success efforts in support of our participating open source maintainers, and invest in scaling the behind-the-scenes operational machinery that makes Tidelift go.

Building a better business model, together

Open source doesn’t just need “funding.” It needs a better business model that works for creators and users alike, at massive scale.

This investment in Tidelift enables us to make that business model possible.

We’re thrilled to have the support of investors who are fully aligned with our commitment to the open source community, business strategy, long-term vision, and values.

If Tidelift makes as much sense to you as it does to us, we welcome you to get involved.

• Open source creators and maintainers: get paid by joining us as a lifter.
• Professional teams that use open source: find out more about the Tidelift Subscription.
• Consider joining our team: we’re hiring in areas including software development, sales, business development, marketing, product management, design, developer relations, human resources, and customer success.

How do we make open source work better for everyone? It’s simple: pay the maintainers. Let’s go. 🚀