When Steve Collins, former Frontline Partner and current CTO of Unity, gets excited about an infrastructure technology company, you know to pay attention—as a three times CTO he has first-hand experience of the issues that technology teams have deploying code securely.
Now a Venture Partner at Frontline, Steve first met Cloudsmith co-founders, Alan Carson and Lee Skillen, in 2019 and was immediately impressed with their technical vision for a cloud-native artifact management platform. Due diligence confirmed that there was a real market need for the product they were building, and with strong early traction, Frontline led Cloudsmith’s Seed round.
Today, as the company announces its $23M Series B investment, it’s clear that Cloudsmith is poised to become a major player in the software supply chain.
Over the past six years, Cloudsmith’s product vision has continued to expand as the company deals with larger and more complicated use cases. Engineers at customers like PagerDuty, Shopify, Kandji, Ford and American Airlines now rely on Cloudsmith for their artifact management.
In 2023 Cloudsmith attracted the attention of Glenn Weinstein, then the Chief Customer Officer at Twilio, who joined as Cloudsmith’s CEO later that year. Glenn has led the company as it expands its commercial presence in the US (where he is based) whilst maintaining the heart of the company in Belfast, where they are one of the fastest-growing software companies.
Fast growing companies in big markets attract a lot of investor attention and so Cloudsmith was able to choose which investors to work with, and chose wisely by picking TCV as lead investor, with participation from Insight Partners, for its Series B. TCV has an incredible track record in infrastructure software, with early investments in Gitlab, Rapid7 and Twilio. Cloudsmith is lucky to have Morgan Gerlak from TCV join their board.
I have no doubt that in a few years much of the world’s code will pass through Cloudsmith’s infrastructure. Which has me left wondering, as NASDAQ tickers CLOU and SMTH are already taken, what will Cloudsmith’s ticker be?
If you are an engineer wondering what the future of software supply chain looks like, go check out cloudsmith.com
Go Team Cloudsmith!
