Open source startup FOSSA is buying StackShare, a site used by 1.5M developers

Open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.

StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications. This encompasses everything from which front-end JavaScript framework to use to which cloud provider to use for specific tasks.

Yonas Beshawred, its solo founder, told TechCrunch that he created the company because he personally found it difficult to choose which technologies he should use to build web applications. “I learned many other developers faced this same challenge and thought the best solution would be to bring everyone together into one online community that had some structure and data to be able to facilitate discussion,” he told TechCrunch. 

The company went on to raise $12 million from investors, including Cervin Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Headline and Gold House. It had over 1.5 million registered developers, Beshawred said, more than 50,000 company profiles, 800,000 monthly active users, and around 30 enterprise customers just before being acquired. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. PitchBook estimated that StackShare’s valuation was around $20 million.

FOSSA, meanwhile, is a source compliance and security platform valued at over $100 million that provides end-to-end governance for third-party code. The company started as a way for developers to see which open source licenses they were using in their products. The hope is that when FOSSA absorbs StackShare, this will help expose its governance and security wares to a broader set of developer tools, Beshawred said. 

“The developer tools space is relatively small so we believe having two startups that have scaled both on the community and enterprise sides come together is a significant moment for the industry,” he added. 

The acquisition started out as a simple partnership late last year called the Tech Stack File, which allowed developers to see all of the technologies used in a particular code base in one file. FOSSA partnered with StackShare as it focused mainly on open source packages and wanted to give their own customers a more comprehensive view of technologies used across its enterprise. “Once we started partnering on this, we realized we had a much larger opportunity,” Beshawred said.

Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA, told TechCrunch that the acquisition was driven by the need for better visibility and management of developer tools within organizations. 

“As the software supply chain gets more complex, companies are struggling to keep track of their developer tools at scale,” he said. “StackShare’s community insights are invaluable in helping companies understand and secure their developer tooling.”

Beshawred will join FOSSA as a product leader. The employees at StackShare, which he described as a small team, will not be joining him. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed with Beshawred only saying that “both sides are happy with the deal.”

He said the merger process felt quite similar to the fundraising process, “where you have to ultimately have a compelling story, metrics, and team to be successful.” He said that he had friends who had been through startup acquisitions before that helped guide him. He added that his investors were supportive and gave a special shoutout to the Black people who supported him, including Aston Motes, the first employee at Dropbox; Baron Davis, a former basketball player; and Charles Hudson at Precursor, who was one of the company’s first backers. He said it meant a lot to him, especially as a Black founder. 

“I also believe there aren’t enough Black people investing in the developer tools and enterprise space, so I’m really proud to have had some amazing ones back me and StackShare,” he continued, adding that this is another proof point that Black founders can build in the developer and enterprise space and achieve success. 

“We built a product used by over 40 million developers because we were solving a really interesting and valuable problem,” he said. “I think there are far too few Black founders solving problems for software engineers and so hopefully this gives more Black people confidence that they can also do it and maybe even inspires some to pursue building in this space.”