JFrog flicks out tongue, hauls in $50m for DevOps splurge

Software delivery automation vendor JFrog has snagged $50m in investment, in what it claims is the biggest single investment in any DevOps company so far.

The Israel-based firm immediately blew some of the cash on a hyperbolic press release that both justified its existence and took a not particularly subtle pop at some of its rivals in the DevOps community.

“The software world is tired of domain dictators and demands a universal powerful solution that supports all technologies and software packages,” said CEO Shlomi Ben Haim. “DevOps and developer teams deserve more – they demand a multi-package, highly available and secured end-to-end solution. JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Bintray are not just a Docker registry, or an npm or Maven repository.”

“This investment will allow us to keep leading the market and push our products to a new level, with a user journey 10x better than Docker, Amazon or other single technology solutions,” he continued. “We are the binary people; it’s either One or Zero. No half-baked solution is good enough for our community and customers. With enough capital secured, we will continue to provide them with class A, enterprise level products and services.”

Calming down a tad, the statement went on to say “Atlassian and GitHub have revolutionized how developers manage source code”, and JFrog aims to do the same for their binaries.

JFrog's central product is Artifactory, which it claims is "the only enterprise-ready repository manager available today, supporting secure, clustered, High Availability Docker registries.” Bintray is JFrog’s distribution as a service offering, while JFrog Mission Control is a management and montoring platform for artifacts.

JFrog’s is the third chunk of cash or credit we’ve seen chucked at DevOps this week, after Sendachi’s $30m investment, and Puppet Labs’ securing of a $22m credit line. Which represents either a vote of confidence in the sector by the money men or a measure of just how modestly they're prepared to bet in this space. Or perhaps both.

Around 1500 paying customers seem to agree with JFrog’s proposition right now, though delivering on that $50m bet will depend on expanding that base quickly and making sure they ultimately gravitate from its $98 a month entry level packages for Artifactory to its $25,900 plus enterprise packages. ®

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