Unleash, a company focused on managing risks in AI-driven software development, has announced a $35 million Series B funding round. The investment aims to help enterprises navigate the challenges posed by artificial intelligence in accelerating software creation.
The Oslo-based firm's commercial platform builds on its open-source feature management technology. This new capital, bringing total funding to $51.5 million, will fuel product innovation and global expansion as companies confront governance issues arising from AI-generated code.
While AI tools significantly speed up software development, Unleash notes that this acceleration has outpaced traditional governance controls. Research indicates a correlation between increased AI adoption and a decrease in software stability. "When AI-generated code is in production, and something breaks, you need the ability to diagnose, fix and recover immediately," stated CEO Egil Østhus. The Unleash platform provides this control, proven in highly regulated industries.
Unleash's FeatureOps is described as an operational layer augmenting DevOps. It governs how features are exposed to users post-deployment, enabling incremental rollouts, impact measurement, and rapid disabling of problematic functionality. "We give them that visibility so they can still move fast but know exactly what’s live and can release it or kill it in seconds," explained CTO Ivar Østhus.
The platform utilizes feature flags, allowing developers to enable or disable functionality at runtime without redeployment, facilitating "surgical rollback" for faulty features. This provides a safety net for developers to leverage AI for faster experimentation with confidence.
Unleash claims its open-source platform is widely adopted, boasting over 13,000 GitHub stars and 40 million downloads. The company has seen substantial annual recurring revenue growth and serves over 500 paying customers, including major financial and technology firms.
"Developers are pushing huge amounts of AI-assisted code, and reviews are moving to production quicker than ever. Speed is up, but reliability is down. AI is accelerating risk because it is almost impossible for QA teams to keep up. This is where FeatureOps comes in," noted a Wayfair Site Reliability Engineer.
The new funding will support expansion in autonomous feature lifecycle management and bolster marketing and sales efforts.
The funding round was led by One Peak Partners LLP, with participation from existing investors.