Unleash Raises $2.5m to Make Developers More Efficient

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Summary

• Unleash makes it easier to release software by bringing an open source low-code platform to developers that allows them to test new features incrementally with a small subset of users, turning features on or off and A/B testing alternatives to gain insights into what works best
• The round was led by UK-based firstminute Capital and Dublin-based Frontline Ventures, with a handful of Norwegian co-investors, including Arkwright X and nFront Ventures
• See Unleash's website and the recent VentureBeat article, for more information

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Full Story

Unleash, a feature management platfrom for developers, has raised a $2.5m Seed round from investors across the UK and Norway.

The round was led by Frontline Ventures and firstminute Capital.

Feature management has emerged as a core component of continuous release/continuous deployment (CI/CD), allowing developers to test new features incrementally with a small subset of users, turning features on or off and A/B testing alternatives to gain insights into what works best — without having to ship a new version.

Unleash was born out of Norwegian tech company Finn.no in 2014 and open-sourced the following year. It was maintained by Ivar Østhus, who is now Unleash’s chief technology officer (CTO), with support from other contributors through 2018. Egil Østhus joined as co-founder and CEO in 2019 for the launch of the commercial version of Unleash.

Unlesh's customers include Lenovo and U.S. manufacturing giant Generac. Beyond paying customers, Unleash has over 5.7 million downloads of its open source platform, and is relied upon by giants such as GitLab.

“By monitoring any issue or possible bugs, our customer will decide to continue their roll-out or improve their software and then redeploy,” Egil Østhus told VentureBeat. “We believe that developer efficiency is the future of business efficiency so we give developer teams the power to experiment and release with confidence.”

With Unleash, companies can configure their rollout strategies so that only a specific group of users will be able to see (and hence use) a new feature, such as those in a specific geographic region or on a particular operating system, or even just a random selection based on a percentage of the company’s overall user base.

nFront Ventures is excited to be part of the journey.

More information here (excerpts borrowed above):

How Unleash is using open source feature management to make devs more efficient