By Rosalie Chan
Startup Armory, which builds software products powered by a hot open source project from Google and Netflix, announced a $40 million Series C round of funding on Tuesday led by B Capital, with Lead Edge Capital and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff participating.
Armory, which has now raised a total of more than $82 million, builds services on top of Spinnaker, open source continuous delivery software developed by Netflix and Google engineers, which helps developers automatically deliver code updates to the cloud more often. Since it launched in 2015, Spinnaker has gained a rabid following, and Armory believes that its additional services and support will help the technology spread even more.
“There’s this huge complexity that comes with the era of big code,” cofounder and CEO of Armory, Daniel Odio, told Business Insider. “That’s the opportunity that we have: To solve the problem for some of the world’s biggest companies — it’s our secret that most of the world doesn’t know yet.”
While companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and HashiCorp have also helped support the project, Armory is part of Spinnaker’s steering committee, which means it helps lead and oversee the direction of the project.
With the funding, Armory plans to double-down on a paid subscription offering that it plans to launch soon called Armory Cloud, which will let customers use Spinnaker with the click of a button. Armory has already won over customers like JPMorgan Chase and Autodesk for its other services and it’s now looking for early sign-ups for its upcoming product.
“As a company, how do I make sure the tens of thousands of developers are all compliant with high security, good auditing, without keeping them from being able to move quickly?” Odio said. “I don’t think executives know how soul-sucking it is. We are giving companies the opportunity to empower their devs.”
Odio says Armory wasn’t looking to fundraise, but faced more demand as many companies needed to update their technology as the pandemic pushed them to remote work.
“Literally our entire reason for existing is to help companies thrive in the digital world,” Odio said. “We’re seeing so much demand and so much lean-in as these companies try to do this on an accelerated time frame.”
New hires for Armory
Armory has also announced a few new people to its team. Salesforce Heroku’s former senior vice president of product management, Margaret Francis, joined as COO, while Cloudera and Confluent vet, Sarah Sproehnle, joined as the worldwide vice president of customer success.
B Capital partner Rashmi Gopinath also joined Armory’s board of directors. Gopinath says she’s excited about the company because the market “is very large” and the product attracts customers.
“I’m super excited about this. I have spent a fair amount of time in open source myself,” Gopinath said. “I am really excited to be able to bring all of that experience together and help armory scale and become part of this space.
