Belfast-based software company Cloudsmith raises $15m

Tiger leads fundraise with Dublin’s Frontline and Nextdoor chief Sarah Friar participating

Software supply chain management company Cloudsmith has raised $15 million (€12.8 million) in funding in a landmark investment for a Northern Irish tech company.

Leading venture capital firm Tiger Global, which is on a spending spree across Europe, has led what is the largest tech funding round in the North since 2005.

Cloudsmith said it intends to use the funding to hire 60 additional employees and expand its US sales and engineering team.

Other new investors participating in the Series A round include Shasta, Amaranthine, Sorenson and Leadout Capital. Previous backers, including Dublin-based Frontline, MMC and Techstart also took part as did angel investors including Sarah Friar, the Northern Irish-born chief executive who leads Nextdoor.

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Cloudsmith, which was founded in 2016, by former NYSE developers Alan Carson and Lee Skillen, has developed an artefact repository and caching platform that provides digital storage for software assets under development.

The solution helps simplify, secure and accelerate software development and delivery pipelines.

The company has customers across Europe, the United States, Middle East and Australia with the US accounting for 60 per cent of revenues.

“Cloudsmith was built to tackle the complexity of managing software assets . . . Our service allows our customers to track and control the distribution of any software asset and provides tooling to minimize the risks of utilising open-source software,” said Mr Carson, the company’s chief executive.

“It’s a massive problem for the whole industry and our investors, led by Tiger Global, understand the need for a fully managed cloud-native solution that Cloudsmith provides,” he added.

Cloudsmith previously raised £2.1 million (€2.45 million) in seed funding in 2019 in a round led by Frontline and London’s MMC Ventures with participation from Techstart Ventures through its TechStartNI fund.

Tiger Global, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley has been behind a number of big investments recently as it turns its focus towards Europe. Among the Irish-founded tech companies it has backed are Stripe, Flipdish and Qualio.

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor is a former Irish Times business journalist