flox, the company bringing the power of Nix to everyone, today announced it has raised $16.5 million in its Series A led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total funding to date to $27 million. flox was incubated at DESCOvery, the D. E. Shaw group’s venture studio, and its early backers include Addition and Hetz Ventures. Notable angel investors include Thomas Dohmke, CEO at Github; Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk; and James Turnbull, former CTO at Microsoft for Startups and VP at Docker, currently CTO at Sotheby’s.
The company today is also introducing its new open source flox platform and is expected to release its enterprise platform later this year. flox expands on Nix’s unique approach to package management and system configuration to provide convenience, collaboration and control throughout the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It is helping developers and enterprises realize the value of Nix with new and powerful capabilities by providing portable, fully-isolated development; test and production environments; a tailored catalog of software packages with flox; and tooling for managing the entire SDLC.
“Building and deploying software in a reproducible, secure manner is perhaps the biggest challenge facing developers today,” said Aaron Jacobson, Partner at NEA. “flox recognizes the innovations within Nix to solve this challenge yet those challenges come with the cost of a steep learning curve. By creating an easy-to-use platform around Nix, flox supercharges productivity for developers everywhere while also making their software more secure.”
“We created flox to give developers better collaboration and control over their development lifecycle, including improved automation over production releases, reduced operational risk and increased productivity,” said Ron Efroni, CEO and co-founder at flox. “We recognized the vast power of Nix but knew there was a market need to take developer tools to the next level, providing versioned environments-as-code that could be consistently released, updated and maintained and that could offer improved security and efficiency. We couldn’t be more excited to offer this to developers and bring this to market now.”
CEO Ron Efroni is a member of the NixOS Foundation board, and several flox team members are Nix contributors. With the goal of more widespread adoption of Nix, the team will continue to contribute, support and promote the Nix project and community. Read more about flox’s story and relationship with Nix here: https://floxdev.com/about.
“flox helps developers and enterprises innovate better and deploy software securely,” said Todd Arfman of Addition. “We’re excited to partner with Ron and his talented team as they continue to expand and roll out their new open source platform to bring Nix to everyone.”
The way software is built is changing. Larger code bases, complex software dependencies, cloud-native technologies and massive security breaches are just a few examples of the reasons organizations are re-evaluating the way they build and deploy software. They’ve started looking beyond containers at tools and platforms that can improve their build and development process, increase efficiency and result in higher quality code, reproducibility and visibility into their stack – in any environment.
flox enables organizations to adopt and implement Nix at scale by providing omni-platform developer, test and production environments defined (and managed) as code. With flox it is easy to share environments and packages across teams, machines, individuals and organizations while integrating into existing workflows. In the areas of Security and Compliance, flox provides complete visibility into the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for applications used in production environments, providing the ultimate visibility into the software stack and enabling real-time vulnerability management and detection without scanning.
“flox was originally built within the D. E. Shaw group to help our developers adopt Nix at scale,” said Ron Davidson, co-head of DESCOvery, the D. E. Shaw group’s venture studio. “The platform is still used at the D. E. Shaw group today, and we’re excited about the value that we believe flox can bring to developers everywhere.”
Developers can start using the flox open source platform today.
The enterprise version is expected later this year and interested parties can sign up here to be the first to know when it’s available.
To stay on the cutting edge of flox development and releases, sign up for its Discourse and follow flox on GitHub.
About flox
flox brings the power of Nix to everyone by offering the first end-to-end solution that empowers teams to accelerate and simplify their Systems Development Life Cycle. flox is the secure way to manage and deploy software in isolated and reproducible development or runtime environments. For more information, please visit: https://floxdev.com.
