Sonatype raises $80 million to build out Nexus platform

Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open-source company, has raised $80 million from investment firm TPG.

The company said the financing will help extend its Nexus platform, which it touts as an enterprise ready repository manager and library, which among other things tracks code and helps to keep everything in the devops pipeline up-to-date and secure.

It’s that kind of technology that Sonatype says can prevent another Equifax -style breach of over 147 million consumers’ data. Earlier this year, the company found over dozens of Fortune Global 100 companies that downloaded outdated and vulnerable versions of Apache Struts, which Equifax failed to patch or update.

Sonatype’s chief executive Wayne Jackson his company can help prevent those type of breaches.

“We monitor literally millions of open source commits per day,” he told TechCrunch. “Last year hundreds of billions of components were downloaded by software developers, 12 percent of which had known security defects.”

The funding will go to extend the company’s Nexus platform, Jackson said.

The company said it’s had an 81 percent increase in year-over-year sales in the first-half of the year, and 1.5 million users added to its flagship Nexus platform since January. In all, the company has more than 10 million software developers and 1,000 enterprises on Nexus worldwide.

Sonatype’s last round of funding was in 2018, led by Goldman Sachs, snagging $30 million.