LaunchDarkly Secures $54M

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners from their Century Fund for growth-stage companies, with participation from Threshold Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Uncork Capital, Vertex Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. With this vote of continued confidence, LaunchDarkly has received a total of $130 million in funding to date.

The investment will be used to address the surge in demand LaunchDarkly has seen for its feature management platform. Companies like IBM, TrueCar, and fuboTV are using LaunchDarkly to control feature lifecycles, eliminate risk from deployment processes, and increase efficiency throughout development cycles.

"LaunchDarkly pioneered the category of feature management and has quickly become the de facto standard to reliably deploy software at scale," says Ethan Kurzweil, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We are excited to support Edith, John and the LaunchDarkly team as they invest in transforming the way that software is built and launched, allowing companies to be more nimble and product-driven."

In 2019, the company served more than 1 trillion features flags a day for more than a thousand customers, an increase of 500% over 2018. The spike was driven by the increasing pressure companies are experiencing to move quickly, innovate faster, and deliver exceptional user experiences. This demand is expected to continue as more teams strive to deliver these results without sacrificing quality or efficiency.

"Dynamic feature management is rapidly becoming the next big innovation in software development, allowing companies of all sizes to ship code faster with less risk," says Josh Stein, Managing Partner of Threshold Ventures. "It's been amazing to see the impact LaunchDarkly is having, and we're excited to see how the platform and the team continue to grow in 2020."

In April 2019 LaunchDarkly held its first conference, Trajectory Conference, in downtown Oakland. Attendees heard talks from industry leaders from organizations like Slack, Microsoft, Datadog, AWS, and IBM. LaunchDarkly will host the Trajectory Conference again on April 29-30, 2020.

LaunchDarkly continues to improve its core platform, including offered add-ons to core feature management functionality:

Experimentation – enabling teams to test ideas in production
Data Export – empowering teams to extract data into external analysis tools
Mobile Monthly Active User Packs – for feature management on mobile devices
The team has added multiple new languages, including Roku and C/C++, and enhanced integrations with GitHub, HashiCorp, and Slack.

"LaunchDarkly is creating an entirely new category called feature management," says Scott Raney, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. "Edith, John, and the team are solving some of the most difficult problems developers and product teams face and we couldn't be more excited to continue on this journey!"

LaunchDarkly will also continue to invest in expanding its team. In 2019 LaunchDarkly grew its team in its Oakland headquarters, opened a sales and customer success hub in New York City, and hired sales, customer success, and developer advocates across North America. In 2020 LaunchDarkly will open sales offices in Sydney, Australia, and an engineering hub in London, UK.

About LaunchDarkly

Founded in 2014 by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that software teams use to build better software, faster with less risk. Development teams use feature management as a best practice to separate code deployments from feature releases. With LaunchDarkly, teams control their entire feature lifecycles from concept to launch to value. Serving over 1 trillion feature flags a day, LaunchDarkly is used by teams at Atlassian, Microsoft, and CircleCI. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners is the world's most experienced early-stage venture capital firm. With a portfolio of more than 200 companies, Bessemer helps visionary entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to create companies that matter, and supports them through every stage of their growth. The firm has backed more than 120 IPOs, including Pinterest, Shopify, Yelp, LinkedIn, Skype, LifeLock, Twilio, PagerDuty, SendGrid, DocuSign, Wix, and MindBody. Learn more at https://bvp.com.