JFrog Raises $50 Million To Provide The App Store For The Internet Of Things

DevOps software maker JFrog has closed a series C round of $50 million, which it is claiming is one of the largest investments in a DevOps focused company.
The round sees new investors Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital tip in cash to fund the growth of the company. With previous rounds raising approximately $12 million, things brings JFrog's total capital raised to $62 million.

Co-founder and CEO Shlomi Ben Haim told me that JFrog plans to double their employee count. While Ben Haim wouldn't disclose the valuation for this round, he did say that it was nearly four times the previous round.

“We want to use the momentum to double our team next year, and maybe even look at acquisitions to enrich and empower our portfolio,” said Ben Haim.

JFrog was founded in 2008, and boasts an impressive list of over 1500 paying customers, including well known companies like Amazon, Netflix and Tesla.

These companies use JFrog's Artifactory software as a package repository, like PyPI, CPAN, or an RPM or .deb repository. When developers build their software, the binary package is added to the Artifactory for other systems to access. Unlike language or environment specific tools, like Docker Registry or Java's Maven, Artifactory supports all of these languages with the one tool.

JFrog also makes Bintray, which provides a distribution service for published code. Other developers, or machines themselves, can grab published software from Bintray. The full pipeline integration from code development, through artifact storage and versioning, to publishing the code will make it much easier for companies doing IoT software to get their code out to the devices they maintain.

JFrog's products integrate with development tools used by modern developers, like Jenkins, Hudson and git, to help automate the process of getting code built, tested, and deployed to other systems that need the packages, and doing it as quickly as possible.

Just as consumers can easily install updated apps automatically on their smartphones, JFrog see a future where devices automatically update themselves with new software as developers commit changes to their build systems.

“Having Bintray as the IoT store is something that we are very excited about,” said Ben Haim. “We want to take automation beyond engineering, beyond the tools you use in-house, we want to take it all the way to consumers.”

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.