Unleash Raises $14 Million Series A to Scale Open Source Feature Management Platform in the U.S. and Europe

Platform provides enterprise developer teams greater flexibility and control over data leading to faster, higher quality, and the most secure feature management and deployment

Unleash, the largest open source feature management platform, announced a $14 million Series A led by Spark Capital with participation from Frontline Ventures, firstminute capital, Alliance Venture, and Arkwright X. The new capital will be used to expand in the United States and Europe and scale product development and go-to-market organization including marketing, sales and customer success. Unleash also announced that Spark Capital’s Natalie Sandman has joined its Board of Directors.

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“By taking an open-source approach to feature management, Unleash gives developers more flexibility, especially when it comes to retaining full control of their data through self-hosting – an increasingly important trend with data privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR”

Unleash is the largest open source feature management platform available to enterprise developers. The technology allows enterprises the ability to release, test and validate new features more effectively and to targeted groups of users. By open sourcing feature flags, full-stack and infrastructure developers can more easily identify any possible negative impact and collect user reactions to the change before rolling it out enterprise-wide. The platform provides greater flexibility, versatility and speed than existing closed source platforms and allows teams to:

• Save time and reduce stress: The fear of introducing a bug or deploying code that isn’t quite ready and the endless sprints for complex releases are eliminated. Unleash’s fit-for-purpose activation strategies decouple release-to-production from release-to-customer, so ​​developers may roll out new features gradually.

• Target rollouts: Users decide how to roll out new features based on geographical region, tenantID, operating system or any attribute of their choice.

• Get peace of mind: Born and headquartered in Europe, Unleash is developed with strict data privacy protection in mind. The flexible delivery model allows the platform to be hosted in Unleash’s cloud, a private customer cloud, or even on premise if required. No end-user PII is ever sent back to the Unleash servers.

“Unleash was created to bring freedom back to developers so they can focus on creating, testing and deploying software. Today’s engineers are constantly bogged down with unnecessary processes, keeping them from doing what they love most: experimenting with and creating software to better their products,” said CEO and co-founder Egil Østhus. “This new investment invigorates Unleash and will help us scale our open source offering and continue helping engineers across the globe faster and more securely.”

According to the State of the Opencloud Report, the 2021 feature management industry is a $7 billion market. That same year, the Unleash global customer base grew 3X and today the company’s customers span financial, telecom and healthcare/life science industries, and include: Medidata Solutions, CreditOne Bank, Yousician, Superside, and Zain Telecom. Docker pulls – or downloads – of Unleash open source grew by 548% to over 12 million, helping to drive 8x year-over-year revenue growth from January 2021 to January 2022.

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“By taking an open-source approach to feature management, Unleash gives developers more flexibility, especially when it comes to retaining full control of their data through self-hosting – an increasingly important trend with data privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR,” said Natalie Sandman, General Partner at Spark Capital. “Egil, Ivar, and the Unleash community have created a product that developers love and I’m excited to work with their team to continue scaling the product to reach as many developers as possible.”

In early 2015, CTO Ivar Østhus launched Unleash on GitHub. As Unleash grew in popularity on the platform, Ivar and his brother Egil officially created the company in 2019 out of Oslo, Norway. Currently, Unleash’s remote-first team operates globally in Norway, Denmark, Poland, Spain, Germany, U.S., Tunisia, and South Africa. The team is looking to expand in 2022, both in US and EU.