SonarSource Inc., which sells a commercial version of an open-source code-testing platform, today said it has raised $412 million from new and existing investors at a valuation of $4.7 billion. The Geneva-based company has raised a total of $457 million.
SonarSource’s open-source and commercial platforms – called SonarLint, SonarCloud, and SonarQube – provide automated code remediation across 29 programming languages. The company said its products are is used by more than 5 million developers at 350,000 companies, 20,000 of whom are paying customers.
The software can be embedded within popular integrated development environments – including Bitbucket, Github and Gitlab – to check code continuously for bugs and security vulnerabilities and then embed clean code directly into the development process.
“We are adding information at every step of development,” said Olivier Gaudin, CEO and co-founder. “Then whenever someone creates a pull request, we can add comments. We also have points for integrating into a release/review process.”
About three-quarters of the code the company has developed is available under an open-source license. The commercial version has proprietary extensions for governance, aggregation, team tracking and server redundancy,” Gaudin said.
With new software being developed at an unprecedented rate, the potential demand is practically unlimited, the CEO said. “Dirty code is a huge problem with a big impact on business,” he said. “If we can improve developer productivity by just 5% the impact is huge.”
SonarSource was recently credited with discovering two 15-year-old security flaws in the PHP Extension and Application Repository tand hat could have been used in supply-chain attacks.
SonarSource’s annual revenue run rate is currently $175 million and the figure is growing 50% annually, Gaudin said. The product is relatively little-known in the U. S. despite deriving about 45% of its revenues from North America. “It’s fairly well-known by practitioners and fairly unknown by others,” Gaudin said. “Developers have generally heard of us.”
The company said plans to use the investment to double its salesforce this year and expand its marketing operations in Switzerland, France, Germany and the U.S. It currently employs nearly 300 people overall and about 40 salespeople, Gaudin said.
The round is led by new investors Advent International Corp. and General Catalyst Partners LLC along with Permira Holdings LLP. Existing investor Insight Venture Partners LP also participated.