Tidelift delivers the Tidelift Subscription, a set of tools, data, and strategies to help organizations manage the health and security of the open source components in their applications. A central element of its model is paying independent open source maintainers behind thousands of components to ensure projects meet enterprise standards, with maintainer earnings tied to subscriber usage and no cap on potential earnings. The company positions itself as a bridge between enterprise application teams and open source maintainers to reduce risk and maximize value from open source. Tidelift cites increasing demand driven by supply-chain threats like Log4Shell and new U.S. government software security standards, including SBOM requirements. Customers and adopters named in the announcement include Fannie Mae, Bloomberg, Hughes, Adobe, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IEEE, the United States Geological Survey, and the United States Air Force. Tidelift was named a 2022 Gartner Cool Vendor and is hosting a free virtual event, Upstream, on June 7, 2022 to engage developers and maintainers. Tidelift is a startup founded by long-time open source engineers and executives that sells subscriptions providing assurances around security, licensing, and maintenance for open-source software. Its platform handles licensing and offers guarantees for critical vulnerabilities and long-term support, drawing on a model similar to Red Hat's commercialization of Linux. Since launch the company has expanded beyond JavaScript to cover Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby ecosystems and now covers hundreds of open-source packages including Apache Struts, Vue.js, Gulp, Carbon, Jekyll, Beautiful Soup, and Mongoose. Tidelift reported $1 million in open source maintainer commitments as of last September and counts Discourse among its customers. The company intends to use new funding to further expand package coverage and partner with more open source creators. CEO Donald Fischer leads the company. Tidelift professionalizes open source software by offering the Tidelift Subscription, a single source for purchasing and maintaining open source software with professional support and maintenance from experts. The Tidelift Subscription already supports an array of popular open source technologies and coverage is being added continuously. Tidelift leverages data from the open source project Libraries.io, which tracks more than 2.6 million open source packages and powers the subscription. The company is led by Donald Fischer, Havoc Pennington, Jeremy Katz and Luis Villa. Tidelift said it will use new funding to continue to expand operations. The company is based in Boston, MA.

Total raised

$67M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

May 2022