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Venture Capital News: npm Raises $8M Series A

2015-04-14
OAKLAND, CA, Widely used package manager for JavaScript, announced today that it has raised $8 million for a series A round.
npm, Inc., the most widely used package manager for JavaScript, announced today that it has raised $8 million for a series A round of funding. The series was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a leading investor in developer-facing businesses, and Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil will join the board. True Ventures also participated in the round. The company previously raised $2.6 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, and a number of other individual investors.

npm, Inc. has also launched npm Private Modules, a long-awaited feature of the platform that enables developers to share and re-use private and confidential code. Pricing plans for npm Private Modules will be $7 per month for individuals. More than 2,000 developers have already signed up to trial the service.

'The Unix philosophy that npm follows of small modules has been a real boon for us,' said Dion Almaer, VP Engineering, Walmart Labs. 'It is also critical to make sure that you can manage these dependencies and make sure that they are available in a secure way, which npm Private Modules provide.'

'Module driven development is a growing priority in our development workflow at DocuSign, and npm has been critical to enabling that shift,' said Edmond Meinfelder, node architect at DocuSign Inc. 'We have benefited from npm's Enterprise offering supporting our security needs, and npm Private Modules is a great addition to npm's toolkit; it's key for individuals and companies who want to protect their intellectual property.'

npm's package manager powers 2.4 million JavaScript developers on a daily basis, with one billion packages downloaded every month via npm's registry of more than 140,000 packages of Javascript code. The popularity of service oriented architectures and microservices now require sophisticated orchestration with hundreds of SDKs for APIs and other independent pieces of code. npm's ability to instantly install, publish and manage JavaScript packages, in addition to its versioning capabilities with different dependencies, have made it a must-have in developers' toolkits as they adopt this approach.

Companies that leverage npm for publishing its SDKs for JavaScript include Twilio, Google, Microsoft, New Relic and Amazon Web Services.

'We're in a new era of module-driven development where software is built using a multitude of building blocks instead of one monolithic code base,' said Isaac Schlueter, CEO and co-founder of npm, Inc, and creator of npm. 'npm was designed to fit seamlessly in this new way of coding, making developers' lives easier and enabling better collaboration across teams. We're excited to leverage this funding to continue improving npm and cater to our thriving community of passionate developers.'

'npm is fast becoming essential to the future of Javascript development. Under Isaac's leadership, Node.js went from a side project to a means for enterprises to run critical infrastructure,' said Ethan Kurzweil, partner with Bessemer Venture Partners and recent addition to npm's Board of Directors. 'As we pursued an investment in npm, I was overcome by developer love for the team, product and company. And while I'm still not sure what 'npm' actually stands for, my personal acronym became 'now pick me!' I didn't want to miss out in the future success of this company; I had to get involved.'

'npm is critical to making Node.js work; it is the default package manager and the key gateway for anybody building Node.js apps,' said Puneet Agarwal, a partner at True Ventures. 'Isaac, Laurie Voss and Rod Boothby comprise a veritable dream team of Node.js superstars, and we are thrilled to continue our support of their company.'

npm, Inc. was founded in 2013 by npm's creator Isaac Schlueter, along with Rod Boothby, a longtime entrepreneur with a quantitative background in derivatives finance and risk management at Wells Fargo and Ernst & Young, and Laurie Voss, a developer of 18 years with experience at Yahoo! who also cofounded a successful startup that was acquired in 2014.

About npm, Inc.
npm, Inc. is the company that hosts and manages npm, the most widely used package manager for JavaScript, used daily by 2.4 million developers worldwide with one billion packages downloaded every month. Isaac Schlueter created npm as an open-source project in 2009 to serve as the package manager for node.js, and it was quickly adopted by all of JavaScript. npm, Inc. is dedicated to the long term success of the JavaScript community, which includes the success of the open-source Node.js and npm projects. npm is used by more than 30,000 companies, including Docusign, SiriusXM, Uber, and Visa, to manage and deploy packages. Founded in 2014 by Schlueter, Laurie Voss and Rod Boothby, npm, Inc. is based in Oakland, California. For more information, please visit www.npmjs.com.

About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) invests in early-stage, hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, Cambridge, New York, Bangalore, and Herzliya. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like Pinterest, Twitch, Box, LinkedIn, Shopify, Yelp, Skybox and Skype. More than 100 BVP companies have gone public. Learn more at www.bvp.com or on Twitter @BessemerVP.

About True Ventures
Founded in 2006, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. The firm previously made investments in companies such as FitBit, Automattic and MakerBot. For more information, please visit www.trueventures.com.
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