Belfast’s Cloudsmith just closed £2.1m in seed funding

13 Nov 2019

From left: Paddy Carey, Alan Carson, Peter Lorimer, Lee Skillen and Kimberly Neill. Image: Cloudsmith

The latest funding round will be used to ramp up Cloudsmith’s R&D operations and marketing capabilities.

Today (13 November), Belfast-based tech start-up Cloudsmith announced that it has secured £2.1m in funding, which is one of the largest seed funding rounds generated by a start-up in Northern Ireland.

The round was led by Frontline Ventures and MMC Ventures, as well as Techstart Ventures through its Invest NI fund.

The company, which is currently participating in a landing pad initiative in San Francisco, also announced at the beginning of the year that it had secured early-stage investment from Techstart Ventures.

Cloudsmith’s SaaS platform offers advanced logistics for software developers, operators and vendors who need to secure, manage and accelerate their product development and distribution.

This round of funding will be used to ramp up Cloudsmith’s R&D and marketing capabilities, with a focus on bringing its universal artefact caching service to market. This service provides software developers with an isolation and edge-caching layer that aims to add resilience and performance capabilities to modern software delivery.

Critical stage of growth

Alan Carson, CEO of Cloudsmith, said: “We believe that the concept of provenance will play a defining role in the future of software security and quality. All companies need end-to-end visibility and control of the assets in their software pipelines.

“It’s important to have the support of Frontline and MMC as we enter this critical stage in Cloudsmith’s growth.”

The company’s CTO, Lee Skillen, added: “Customer feedback has shown that a single cloud-based platform for managing software artefacts builds collaboration and communication between teams – a critical aspects of the DevOps culture we facilitate.”

Steve Collins, partner at Frontline Ventures, said: “The guys are building what is in effect a foundational element for the next stage in the evolution of software development and distribution.

“Protecting developers and businesses from the chaos of public software will be a game changer.”

Hal Wilson, partner at Techstart Ventures, added that the investment is a “clear vote of confidence” in the Cloudsmith team and their ability to execute their vision.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com