Tidelift, a provider of solutions for improving open source software supply chain resilience, today announced investments from AEI HorizonX, AE Industrial Partners’ venture capital investment platform formed in partnership with The Boeing Company, and Cisco Investments, extending the company’s Series C financing to $33.5M alongside existing investors Dorilton Ventures, Kaiser Permanente, Atlassian Ventures, General Catalyst, and Foundry.
This investment comes as open source software health and security have become a pressing priority for organizations and governments around the world. Recent threats to the software supply chain like the Log4Shell vulnerability have led organizations to reassess how they manage the open source software that comprises the bulk of their applications. Additionally, both the US government and industry leaders are calling for improved security standards for open source.
“Tidelift’s vision for improving open source resilience continues to be validated by the market, which is underscored by the investments of these industry leaders,” said Donald Fischer, Tidelift co-founder and CEO. “We look forward to working together to bring our unique approach of managing the software supply chain—and incentivizing the people who maintain it—to new customers across a variety of industries.”
As organizations increase the use of open source in their applications, they face the growing challenge of keeping it well maintained and secure at scale. The Tidelift approach to managing open source is being embraced by the enterprise with new and expanding customers including Fannie Mae, Bloomberg, Hughes, Adobe, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IEEE, the United States Geological Survey, and the United States Air Force.
AEI HorizonX was formed as Boeing’s corporate venture capital arm in 2017 and is now managed as a partnership with AE Industrial Partners, a U.S.-based investment firm specializing in aerospace, defense and government services, space, power and utility services, and specialty industrial markets.
“AEI HorizonX is committed to spurring innovation that improves the open source software that powers the aerospace industry and the public sector,” said Tyler Rowe, principal at AEI HorizonX. “Tidelift’s approach of partnering with maintainers to ensure their open source projects meet accepted enterprise standards allows organizations like Boeing to more fully utilize open source and, ultimately, deliver more value to customers.”
“With the industry’s growing reliance on open source, Cisco is committed to enabling security and compliance for open source software and applications for our customers and developers,” said Vijoy Pandey, vice president, Emerging Technologies and Incubation at Cisco. “We are pleased to support Tidelift’s proactive approach to working in partnership with the open source maintainer community to help drive greater health and safety in the open source supply chain.”
Tidelift plans to use the additional investment to help expand the capabilities of its open source software management solution and extend its market reach, as improving open source security and increasing software supply chain resilience have become top priorities for application development teams.
