LaunchDarkly gets $8.7M to get access to the right features in front of right users. LaunchDarkly originally launched to nail a big pain point for developers that has been a luxury at larger companies for a while — soft-launching features and new code for a small set of users seamlessly and being able to quickly roll them back. And that potential has caught the attention of investors, leading to a new $8.7 million round of financing led by DFJ, with Softech and Bloomberg Beta following on. It’s not too far off the original vision for LaunchDarkly, but it does indeed expand the market opportunity for the company. But it turns out that LaunchDarkly users saw the potential for it to go beyond just keeping disasters from happening when rolling out code, which has helped Harbaugh expand the original scope of the company. Harbaugh said that this is a tool that helps larger companies like Facebook better roll out new features, such as giving a set of users an early look at new features or rolling out small tests. We know the big companies can build this in-house but we can’t. The bigger companies are more successful because they have this functionality, and the other companies said they want this too. “The issue is, the real value we have is all the user interface, the dashboards, the control,” she said. Facebook open sourced the basic functionality of service features to different pieces, but they didn’t open source who has access to what, which layers.
LaunchDarkly originally launched to nail a big pain point for developers that has been a luxury at larger companies for a while — soft-launching features and new code for a small set of users seamlessly and being able to quickly roll them back.
But since the company launched and last raised $2.6 million in June, CEO Edith Harbaugh and the team have found a new audience for that: the marketers and business teams within companies that want to be able to turn on those features for the right users. And that potential has caught the attention of investors, leading to a new $8.7 million round of financing led by DFJ, with Softech and Bloomberg Beta following on.
“Our original tagline was Launch, Measure, Control,” Harbaugh said. “We’ve expanded the definition of who in the organization can do that. We were focused originally on developers, we still love developers, but we want to put those capabilities into the rest of the hands of the business.”
The idea is that while developers have had the ability to flip on new code and features within the LaunchDarkly dashboard and services, the business side of the company also needs the ability to do that but has traditionally had to go through the developers to get that done. One example would be securing a client and needing to turn on the right features for them right away without having to go to the engineering side and telling them to flip the switch.
It’s not too far off the original vision for LaunchDarkly, but it does indeed expand the market opportunity for the company. And it should be doubly true for larger companies with big, sprawling employee bases that need access to…
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