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Explores AI-driven development, rising supply chain attacks, and new regulatory requirements.

2026 Artifact Management Report

, with participation from our existing investors, to build the operating system for the modern software supply chain. The timing matters because AI is changing what it means to build software.

We’ve been doing it long enough to see the internet change how we distribute software. We’ve seen open source change how we reuse components. We’ve seen CI/CD change how we build and deploy. We’ve seen cloud change how we run infra. We’ve seen SaaS change how we architect applications.

With each evolution, we expand what developers can achieve and how quickly they can move. We evolve our way of working and the tools we use. AI may be the most consequential evolution yet because it touches every area I just listed.

Developers will always play a central role, even as bots update dependencies, CI/CD systems continuously consume artifacts, agents write code and push changes through systems at a scale that humans can’t manually review at the same pace. Developers know what to build and why, but there’s been a change in the laws of physics for software.

We want developers to move faster. We want teams spending less time fighting infrastructure and more time building things that matter. Our tools must make building software safe, so we trust developers to run at maximum tilt.

Cloudsmith sits at a critical point in the trust chain. That is why this Series C matters: it gives us the fuel to deliver on that promise at a time when software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

Artifact management was always the control point

When Cloudsmith began, artifact management was still seen as busywork and plumbing - necessary, but boring. You wrote code, pushed packages somewhere, pulled them into another system, and moved on. But Cloudsmith didn’t see it that way.

When you think about how we construct software, source code matters, but really, most software actually exists as “artifacts” - our word for packages, containers, dependencies, metadata, SBOMs, signatures, provenance, and builds.

Artifacts are the threads that connect modern software creation, consumption, governance, and delivery.

Artifact management was seen as repositories, storage, and developer convenience - a place to hold packages. But things have gotten… complicated. The explosion of open-source packages, evolving threats to the software supply chain, and the rise of agentic AI software development have shown that artifacts are, in fact, the critical control point.

Cloudsmithers are true believers. The market has now caught up with that belief.

Software and AI have entered the age of assembly

Software is assembled far more than it’s authored. We build software by combining ingredients - what developers call “dependencies” - into something useful. The flow of ingredients is what we call the software supply chain. The shift from “write code myself” to “assemble software from components” has been happening for decades; AI agents have accelerated this to a breathtaking scale.

Think of this as the AI software factory - a place where we build pipelines for AI to assemble software. Humans decide what to build and oversee the process. Agents write and change the code. CI/CD systems build and test the components they produce. Partner tools inspect them. Registries and package managers supply additional ingredients. Deployment systems ship the final product.

 that over 1.1 million public repositories import LLM SDKs, with 518 million merged PRs, growing 29% annually. I’m certain that’s accelerated in the past 6 months.

Every dependency use is a trust decision, and every artifact has provenance: where it came from. Every artifact should also have a policy: how it should be used. And every artifact has ownership: who is responsible for it. Because every artifact has a blast radius: what happens if it is vulnerable, malicious, or misconfigured?

These decisions matter, whether you make them explicitly or you just let them happen. We’ve collectively let our guard down when it comes to software supply chain trust, and threat actors know it. Their attacks are increasing, they’re creative and ever-changing, and they’re effective enough that every serious organization has to care.

 in March 2025 affected more than 23,000 code repositories and exposed CI/CD secrets in workflow logs. Axios, one of the npm ecosystem’s most widely used HTTP clients, was 

 (April 2026) through malicious npm releases that deployed a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT), at a scale of 100 million downloads per week. Those represent huge surface areas of potential impact.

Despite these incidents, we’re going to keep building software using components, and if anything, we’re speeding up. “Don’t use dependencies” isn’t an option. The only viable path is forward - to control the flow of components (we’d say “artifacts” at Cloudsmith).

Automating the control point for the new age

Humans have traditionally been the control surface for the software supply chain. Developers are trained to pull packages from public registries. For example, every Python 101 course teaches “pip install” on the first day, accepting that the default target is PyPI. It’s not until advanced courses (if ever) that developers start asking, “Where exactly do those packages come from, anyway?”

As you assemble teams to build software, you typically add some rigor to dependency management, with manual reviews, metrics, logs, and dashboards. You might already have reactive security scanning that blocks unwanted packages when PRs are merged, at the end of the development process. But that approach no longer scales. To keep up with modern software velocity, teams need automation, along with, by default, machine-enforceable, context-rich guardrails that are fast enough to prevent bottlenecks.

Cloudsmithers are optimistic by nature. We’re not into fear, uncertainty, and doubt. We’re more about clarity, control, and confidence. Clarity means knowing which packages are being used. Control means governing how they move and how they are distributed. Confidence means developers and agents can move fast without breaking trust.

Visibility here matters - we need SBOMs, SCA, and inventory tools to see and understand the software supply chain. But we actually need more than to see the problem space; we need to control it. That’s what makes artifact management so critical to governing the software supply chain.

We say at Cloudsmith that you need visibility to get control, and you need control to get security. Security is ultimately a by-product of strong controls and visibility.

Cloudsmith isn’t an application security tool; we’re infrastructure, and our role in the modern software factory is to serve as the artifact control plane. We sit where software components cross boundaries: from upstreams into the enterprise, from developers into builds, from builds into environments, and beyond. Cloudsmith is where you manage software artifacts, attach metadata, prove provenance, enforce policy, and govern distribution.

Stronger security is a by-product of a stronger underlying control point.

Cloudsmith 2.0: the operating system for the modern software supply chain

Cloudsmith 2.0 is our vision for the operating system of the modern software supply chain. It’s our underlying architecture, and it’s what makes Cloudsmith more than just a registry service for artifacts.

We use the operating system metaphor deliberately because operating systems are foundational. They provide shared primitives and guarantees that make it easier, faster, and safer to build complex systems. The modern software supply chain needs the same thing: artifact identity, metadata, provenance, policy, audit, routing, caching, and delivery, all working together across a global graph of producers, consumers, partners, and ecosystems.

The Cloudsmith 2.0 operating system is built around three core layers:

A record layer that gives you a durable source of truth for artifacts, identity, metadata, and provenance.

A control layer that lets you make fast, enforceable, and auditable decisions.

A delivery layer that distributes software efficiently to your developers, pipelines, and external customers.

Partners can plug data, signals, workflows, and expertise into those layers, while customers build their own software supply chain workflows on top. Together, those layers turn artifact management into a shared data and control plane, where components are governed and delivered at web scale.

Cloudsmith is built for this because we are global, cloud-native, and multi-tenant by design. Our DNA is different from legacy, per-installation, single-tenant registry architecture that dominated the artifact management space before we came along. The Cloudsmith 2.0 operating system means package health intelligence, actionable feedback, data pre-computation, and fast policy decisions compound across the ecosystem.

A big benefit of Cloudsmith 2.0 is that more work can be done in advance. Artifacts are ingested, canonicalized, enriched, stored, and linked before they are requested. Actionable policy decisions happen quickly because the system already has the data. Software delivery is more predictable with a platform built on global routing, caching, and connectivity.

That’s pretty technical, but the outcomes are clear: safer, faster software, at any scale. One signal protects many customers. Each trusted record reduces duplicated work. A unified control plane helps cross-functional, distributed teams make better trust decisions and consume software with the right evidence and controls.

Accelerating Cloudsmith’s vision with partners, investors, and customers

Our Series C financing is fuel for the mission we’ve been on since we started.

We will accelerate Cloudsmith 2.0, with AI-native workflows, stronger software supply chain controls, a deeper automated policy engine, richer provenance and insights, package-aware delivery and connectivity, and more pluggability with partner tools.

Cloudsmith believes in partnerships. Surprisingly, this is still a fairly radical notion in the artifact management market. But we just don’t think any one vendor will supply the definitive scanner, CI/CD pipelines, security data source, and workflow tooling an enterprise needs. The better approach is an open control plane where partners combine their signals, workflows, and expertise into a central software component control point.

“Docker has always been where developers build and ship software, and security has to be the default, not an afterthought. Docker Hardened Images and Docker Hardened System Packages set a new standard for trusted containers. With Cloudsmith, enterprises can manage those hardened components at scale and deliver secure software without friction."

“Cloudsmith has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the modern SDLC - the cloud-native artifact registry that replaces legacy tools and actually scales with how enterprises ship software. Our joint customers integrate it with Endor Labs for malicious package firewalling, function-level reachability, and automated remediation. That combination is powerful for securing the AI coding era.”

 – Varun Badhwar, Founder and CEO, Endor Labs

“Cloudsmith has been a great partner with Aikido. We're both re-inventing what it means to secure the software supply chain. We're seeing Cloudsmith a lot more in our customer base, and they're great to work with.”

 — Roeland Delrue, Co-founder and COO, Aikido

Software supply chain attacks, regulatory pressure, and enterprise platform consolidation make artifact management a board-level concern.

Enterprises see artifact management platforms as the crucial enabler of engineering speed, security control, compliance evidence, and software trust.

Our lead investors, TCV and Insight Partners, understand that shift. They invested in our Series B last year, and we’re grateful for their growing belief and conviction:

“Having led Cloudsmith’s Series B and now its Series C, TCV is proud to deepen our partnership with a company we see as defining artifact management for the AI era. As AI shapes the software supply chain, we believe Cloudsmith is uniquely positioned to become a platform enterprises rely on for compliance, control, and security at global scale.”

“In an era increasingly defined by AI-driven development, securing the software supply chain is critical. As a cloud-native offering, Cloudsmith is well-positioned to do this – providing the scale and reliability needed to power enterprise and AI-driven builds and mitigate emerging risks. We believe in Cloudsmith’s vision to secure the software supply chain by serving as a curated, AI-ready solution for enterprises of all sizes.”

 — Thomas Krane, Managing Director, Insight Partners

. We’re serving a rapidly growing range of technology and software companies, AI startups, mid-market companies, and mainstream enterprises. They all want a software supply chain that’s fast enough for developers, safe enough for security teams, clear enough for audit and compliance, scalable enough to keep up with their ambitions, and simple enough that it just works.

We’d like to think that the best infrastructure companies are ahead of their time, and that the foundations Cloudsmith laid down years ago are paying off today.

In the compiler era, we converted human intent into reliable software. In the cloud era, we operated software at a global scale for the first time. In the AI era, we need to figure out how to use and trust software that’s created, assembled, and changed faster than humans can manually inspect or even fully understand.

Cloudsmith is here to help answer that question.

A heartfelt thank you to our customers. You’ve trusted Cloudsmith, sometimes before it was obvious why our software category was so important. You’ve consistently pushed us to build better because you rely on us for critical infrastructure, engineering, security, and platform workflows. We take that responsibility seriously.

Every Cloudsmither can take pride in our passion for our craft and in the hard work that has made Cloudsmith the company it is today - a special place. The market is pulling toward the problems we set out to solve from the beginning. This is our moment, and it’s time to earn it.

We’re by developers, for developers, and we always have been. We feel a kinship with the builders, platform teams, security professionals, and enterprise leaders who want to build safely in the age of AI. Because software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

We’ve got Cloudsmith 2.0 and the future of the software supply chain to build.

Glenn Weinstein

Check out press coverage, a video from our leadership team, and a note from our investors

Learn about our Series C

We built Cloudsmith for this moment

That’s what I want for Northern Ireland’s software sector. And we are doing it together.

Northern Ireland is a great place to live. Culturally, we are a country of innovators and builders, and it is already a great place to build software. Whether you are starting something new or want to contribute to systems and tools used all over the world, the software industry in NI is well-established.

Yes, we have our challenges as a country, just like anywhere else. But we have an exciting and emerging startup ecosystem, circling venture capital, and we are the software development headquarters for big companies like Aflac, Allstate, and Liberty Mutual. And we finally have an official LEGO store.

I left Northern Ireland two days after graduating from Queen’s University Belfast in 2002, and lived in the United States and then England for a few years. But soon the love of grey skies pulled me back home and into a job at a newly minted startup, albeit one that struggled to find its feet. 

After moving on from my first NI-based startup. I then watched Danny Moore sell Wombat Financial Technologies to the mighty New York Stock Exchange in 2008. This was a signpost of what is possible with great leadership and execution. So when Lee and I founded Cloudsmith, our goal was, and still is, to build a world-class product company headquartered in Belfast.

There are many challenges with building a business, especially in a small country with just under 2 million people. We have great universities in Ulster University and Queen’s (and not forgetting our friends at the Open University), producing a steady stream of graduates; there is a growing talent pool and lots of opportunity for innovation.

Those who have tasted success can inspire, guide, and expand the limits of what is possible.

It's pretty unusual to be more than two degrees of (Kevin Bacon) separation away from anyone from Northern Ireland here. We witnessed firsthand the power of diaspora: Northern Ireland looks out for its own, and we made connections all over the world with folks who left to seek their fortune in faraway lands. Some have been absolutely key to Cloudsmith’s success to date, and it’s always a pleasure to hear the unmistakable accent come back at you over Zoom.

We need more success stories. We need to show the workforce that share options are worth something. We need more exits. We need to create more wealth.

I’ve seen the power of being in a well-funded startup with great, founder-friendly early-stage backers (thank you, Techstart, Frontline, and MMC) that can elevate you to take on the competition.

How do we get more money into Northern Ireland companies? How do we get the light from Sauron’s Eye shining on our little country? OK, that sounds ominous, but I mean it in a good way. How can we position ourselves as a hotbed of innovation and talent, to rival Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv?

That is something we are tackling at Software NI, but we need all the help we can get. 

 is dedicated to making Northern Ireland a global leader in technology and software innovation through community, education, advocacy, and support. Everything from championing software literacy in schools to affecting governmental policies to ensure software is part of our future.

We welcome you to engage with the community at the new 

, organized by Software NI. The inaugural event will take place on Thursday, 26th March, in The Mac. It promises to be an excellent opportunity to listen to industry leaders, including Danny Moore, discuss how they scaled their businesses and created value. I’ll be there too :)

Remember, Northern Ireland is amazing, Cloudsmith is building something great, and Software NI is striving to create an ecosystem where people and software companies of all shapes and sizes can thrive.

Alan Carson

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer

I love Software (in) NI

Our mission at Cloudsmith is to provide development, DevOps, and platform engineering teams with an incredibly powerful, easy-to-use tool for controlling and securing software artifacts globally. We build features with the enterprise in mind–features that provide centralized management and policy enforcement across hundreds of teams and thousands of developers.

We have an ambitious vision to run the world’s software supply chain more efficiently, more securely, and more intelligently than is possible with the traditional set of tools available in our market.

To that end, we made fantastic progress in 2025 in extending the reach of Cloudsmith to organizations new to enterprise-grade artifact management platforms, as well as organizations upgrading from legacy vendors to meet their internal scalability and security requirements. Let’s review some key milestones we achieved in 2025 with our customers and partners.

A peek behind the curtain into the goings-on at Cloudsmith HQ.

 and many of our existing investors. This investment reflects the confidence our customers place in Cloudsmith to control their mission-critical software build workloads, as well as the hard work from every Cloudsmither. We’re using the funding to build an even better Cloudsmith that can cover more use cases, handle near-infinite scale, and be the fastest and most reliable solution on the market.

We added quite a few Cloudsmithers, increasing our total headcount by 92% in 2025. We’re using all that effort and brainpower to stay on top of the software supply chain security space, so we can help our customers protect their own build pipelines against emerging threats.

A couple of notable honors made their way to Cloudsmith HQ this year:

: Tech Visionary of the Year – Cloudsmith CTO Lee Skillen.

 Leaderboard 2025: Cloudsmith ranked number 59.

Ships are nothing new in Belfast, our home city which has a proud shipbuilding history. That said, at Cloudsmith, we prefer to ship code. Here are a few highlights from the new features and capabilities we launched in 2025:

: Cloudsmith extends artifact management and governance to 

 and datasets, allowing you to control and manage AI artifacts alongside the rest of your software supply chain. ML models flow through the same access controls, policies, scanning, and audit trails as packages and containers, so adopting AI doesn’t introduce new blind spots or require parallel tooling.

 Enables you to define policies as code that match how your pipelines and security rules actually work. Policies can incorporate context such as package metadata, vulnerability severity, and licenses, and enforce those criteria before promoting or using artifacts.

: Automatically checks artifacts for vulnerabilities, malware, and malicious packages on a rolling basis, generating reports hourly. When a new vulnerability is reported against a previously allowed package, EPM triggers a re-evaluation of artifacts against your standing policies and automatically takes actions, such as blocking or quarantining.

Malware scanning and malicious package detection:

 Adds malware and malicious package detection to traditional vulnerability scanning, preventing malicious packages from entering repositories or being distributed. This helps teams avoid pulling in unsafe dependencies from upstream sources and reduces the risk of compromised software spreading through CI/CD pipelines or to customers.

: Enable teams to distribute software to customers or partners in a developer-native way, using the same delivery platform and governance they rely on internally, while presenting it through a branded, customer-facing experience. Customers can restrict, audit, and revoke access without setting up parallel systems or losing visibility–so external delivery doesn’t become a security or operational exception.

: We added new upstreams for four supported formats this year (

), and increased our support for native signing to include 

: When you want to give your eyes a rest, dark mode is at the ready!

We know our customers derive business value from Cloudsmith, because they’re building more software with Cloudsmith.

Total package delivery increased 352% YoY.

The most popular artifact types were Python, npm, NuGet, rpm, Debian, and Maven, which together made up 90% of all artifact requests.

The most consumed formats by size (accounting for 90% of total gigabytes delivered) were Docker, Python, raw, npm, and NuGet.

💡Interesting fact: In total bytes, Docker image deliveries in the first 

 of December 2025 was nearly the same as that for the entire month of January 2025.

npm and Python package delivery requests increased by 400% YoY.

Plays Well With Others: Community, Events, and Integrations

The Cloudsmith platform does a lot of heavy lifting, and it does even more together with our partners. We trotted (a good portion of) the globe and scoured the corners of the internet to deliver a better artifact management experience to developers and organizations alike.

We were active in the developer community in 2025. We sponsored or attended 18 events across North America and Europe, connecting with developers and platform teams in 10 cities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, GitHub Universe, PlatformCon, SRECon, and Container Days.

We’re in it for the bright lights and big stages, but some of our favorite moments came from smaller, high-impact community meetups like Kubernetes Community Days in New York and Edinburgh, Cloud Native Dublin, and BSides in our hometown of Belfast.

At every stop, big or small, our goals were to learn from the community, share what we’re building, and help teams ship software with confidence.

It’s worth noting that Cloudsmithers from all over the world also gathered three times this year in our home city of Belfast for all-hands offsites to learn, share, and grow together.

We’re developers building for developers. For us, it’s important to improve the developer experience. We built integrations for developer tools this year to make it easier for users to manage and secure their development pipelines. Here are a few highlights from 2025.

: Allows users to manage experiments run on ML models and collaborate in a centralized location for machine learning test cases.

 integration for better observability and monitoring of how artifacts flow through your software supply chain.

, both public and private Chainguard registries, natively with Cloudsmith.

: Explore and inspect your artifacts from within your 

: Bringing secure artifact management to machine learning development.

From initial conversations, to migrations, to ongoing support, Cloudsmithers provide users with the service and attention they need to make artifact management “just work.” Our customer support satisfaction rose to 

Here’s some of our favorite feedback from customers:

"It's rare these days to see this level of support and engagement when dealing with SaaS support."

"I must say that the support we have received from Cloudsmith has been outstanding."

"I feel it’s important to recognise the Cloudsmith team who have been wonderful throughout the whole process...[they] were patient, fun to talk with (just real-human), knowledgeable, flexible, and truly listened to our needs."

We also published new case studies that demonstrate Cloudsmith’s value, showing how the Cloudsmith experience unfolds from the customer’s point of view.

 shifted focus from infrastructure to managing artifacts securely with Cloudsmith.

 migrated to Cloudsmith and eliminated outages entirely.

consumer and industrial electronics organization

 leveraged Cloudsmith’s Enterprise Policy Manager for better package visibility and governance.

We’re proud of what we helped customers achieve in 2025. And we’re doubling down on our R&D investments in 2026 to deliver an artifact management platform that exceeds anything on the market today.

We want Cloudsmith to be a platform that:

Takes full advantage of our massive-scale, multi-tenant architecture to deliver previously unthinkable performance and scalability to CI/CD pipelines and IDEs no matter where they’re located.

Provides practical solutions for securing the enterprise software supply chain from open source vulnerabilities and malicious packages without hindering productivity.

Works in conjunction with your DevOps stack to deliver a single source of truth for software artifacts, informed by huge public data sets and AI-powered insights.

And we’ll do it all with our ultimate customer–the software developer–foremost in our minds.

Please reach out to me at ceo@cloudsmith.com with your thoughts and suggestions as we seek to build the artifact management platform that the world truly needs. 

Cloudsmith 2025: By the Numbers

Across your organization, teams are rapidly adopting AI and machine learning. They’re pulling ML models and datasets from public sources like Hugging Face and wiring them into workflows that are now reaching production. For platform and security leaders, this creates a familiar challenge: artifacts are entering the software supply chain outside established governance and controls.

Unmanaged AI artifacts carry real risks. They can’t be traced back to their source, they don’t follow compliance processes, and they often bypass the review gates you rely on for code and containers. Left unchecked, they become blind spots and liabilities in your supply chain. Without action, AI artifacts become the weakest link in your supply chain security.

The answer is to manage ML models and datasets with the same level of control and oversight as every other artifact in your supply chain. By managing them through a unified platform—with shared repositories, consistent policy enforcement, and full observability—you ensure that ML workflows are governed by the same standards as the rest of your software supply chain.

The growing adoption of ML models and datasets introduces both opportunity and risk. On one hand, models accelerate delivery by enabling new capabilities at unprecedented speed. On the other hand, they introduce opaque dependencies, security blind spots, and compliance risks into the supply chain—areas where governance practices are still catching up.

Some risks begin earlier in the lifecycle, like poisoned training data or tampered weights during model creation, which can compromise a model before it ever reaches a registry. But the most immediate challenge for platform and security leaders is governance once these artifacts enter the supply chain. Teams often pull models directly from public sources like Hugging Face, bypassing review and scanning. Without versioning and provenance tracking, it’s nearly impossible to prove which model is in use, where it came from, or what depends on it. And without consistent policies, organizations struggle to demonstrate compliance when auditors or regulators come calling.

These risks can’t be left unmanaged. The question is how to bring ML artifacts under control.

ML models and datasets are artifacts, and like any artifact, they need to be versioned, audited, and controlled with the same enterprise-grade policies you’ve put in place for packages like code libraries and container images. As organizations deliver production applications powered by AI, the priority for platform and security leaders is clear: maintain visibility, integrity, and trust in the components that make up these builds.

Cloudsmith’s new ML Model registry support

A Single Source of Truth for ML Models in DevOps

Cloudsmith extends artifact management to ML models and datasets, promoting them to first-class artifacts in your supply chain. This means you can control, secure, and distribute models alongside your language libraries, containers, and other binaries, all governed by the same policies and observability already in place.

: Require approvals, license checks, and compliance gates before a model or dataset is deployed.

: Every artifact is versioned, hashed, and immutable, so tampering can be detected and blocked.

: Capture where a model or dataset came from, how it has changed, and what depends on it.

: Manage ML models (PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, and more) alongside other binary artifacts in the same repositories.

: Proxy and cache models and datasets directly from the Hugging Face Hub, while continuing to use the Hugging Face SDK for training and deployment — ensuring developers keep their workflows while you enforce governance.

DevOps has always been about balancing efficiency, stability, and security. The rise of ML workflows doesn’t change that balance - it heightens the need for it. By incorporating ML models and datasets into Cloudsmith, you extend the same supply chain controls that protect your code and containers to the AI artifacts now driving production systems.

The result: faster innovation without unmanaged risk, and a single platform to govern every component that ships to production.

Learn more about Cloudsmith's ML Model Registry here.

How to securely source your LLM models from Hugging Face

Alison Sickelka

VP of Product

Extending supply chain governance to AI and ML artifacts

The enterprise artifact management market - which has belonged for a while to JFrog and Sonatype - is now 

Cloudsmith was built on the core principle that 

. So does simplicity in design and workflow. Partnerships matter, too. We’ve built a comprehensive platform that controls and secures every artifact as it’s built, scanned, signed, stored, and shipped across the software supply chain. We’ve tailored our product to the specific needs of large organizations, which support hundreds of software development teams, rely on a huge range of languages and formats, operate at massive scale, and need to ensure the provenance and integrity of artifacts entering their supply chain.

Our work is paying off. Today our product helps Fortune 500 and Global 2000 corporations, as well as independent software companies, build and distribute their software more securely and efficiently. Many of these customers migrated to Cloudsmith from the two primary legacy solutions on the market - JFrog’s Artifactory, and Sonatype’s Nexus. These customers came to us because they ran into challenges scaling to ever-increasing DevSecOps demands. They asked for a fully managed platform that just works, so they can focus on building software, not infrastructure, CDNs, or clusters. And they recognized Cloudsmith as a fresh, modern, developer-friendly, API-first experience. Cloudsmith is infrastructure you don’t have to think about.

A successful startup transitions into scale-up mode when it solves customer problems in new and innovative ways, and starts to win real market share. Cloudsmith has arrived here. We 

closed our Series B with TCV and Insight Partners

 earlier this year to fund our growth. We’re seeing incumbents take notice. We’re seeing analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester recognizing Cloudsmith as a new and legitimate candidate for enterprises with complex needs. JFrog CFO Ed Grabscheid confirmed our growing market share when he 

told investors at a Bank of America conference

 on June 5 that they see two main competitors: Sonatype and a “

very, very small startup that is a cloud-native tool… not even worth mentioning the name,

” I’m pretty sure he was talking about Cloudsmith.

We agree that large organizations are looking at three main options - JFrog, Sonatype, and Cloudsmith - for comprehensive artifact management. The artifact offerings from hyperscalers like Azure, AWS, and Google, as well as SDLC leaders like GitHub and GitLab, are limited to a handful of formats and use cases. They’re okay for small teams, but they’re not intended to scale across broad engineering organizations. We hear every day from JFrog and Sonatype customers who are curious if Cloudsmith is a viable alternative to their legacy vendor, and from platform engineering teams who recognize the benefits of a common internal set of universal artifact repositories.

I suppose it’s in the spirit of this head-to-head competition that 

 of our advanced security offerings. They didn’t reach out to us in advance, and appear to have based their findings on their use of a Cloudsmith self-service trial account. We would have been happy to help them make a more well-informed comparison! We think their conclusions are misleading or highly confused, and they got a lot flat-out wrong. Our solutions engineers love working with prospective Cloudsmith customers to showcase the actual capabilities of Cloudsmith, in a way that’s relevant to their company’s processes, scale, and needs.

There is one point in JFrog’s analysis of Cloudsmith that I found telling. They seem to fault our approach to artifact security scanning for relying on third-party industry vulnerability data. This outlook seems to align with JFrog’s general position on partnerships (that they’re bad for business). At that same Bank of America conference, JFrog’s CFO said that when it comes to security scanning, “

” cannot operate without having a proxy to JFrog for access to the binary artifacts, which is true. 

you could cut the oxygen off to these point solutions. We choose not to do that, but most customers see advantage to two things: consolidation, and to secure the most critical asset, which is your binary.

We just have a different philosophy. We don’t think customers want their artifact management vendor to be their only source of vulnerability data and security scanning. In other words, not all JFrog Artifactory customers want to depend solely on JFrog Xray. We know that for sure, because they’ve told us. So we’re working hard to ensure Cloudsmith works well with commercial and open source security tools like ClamAV, Trivy, and Grype, as well as data sources like EPSS and CVSS, and we regularly incorporate their data into the metadata that’s available inside Cloudsmith repositories and exposed to our Enterprise Policy Manager (EPM). In this way, Cloudsmith is the control plane and the data plane for the entire software supply chain, but we don’t think we should be the sole provider of security data. We will not - to quote JFrog - “cut the oxygen off” from our partners in the ecosystem. We feel similarly about CI/CD, runtime scanning, observability, and hardened images; solving software supply chain security works best as a team sport.

If you want to see why so many companies are turning to Cloudsmith, 

 about what a modern, scalable, cloud-native artifact platform could look like for your organization.

The Artifact Management Market Is Up For Grabs

Exploring AI and the future of the software supply chain

AI assistants will shape the future of the software supply chain, and today, we’re sharing a glimpse of a powerful idea in motion: 

 server that connects large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude directly to your software supply chain using the emerging 

Imagine managing policies, surfacing security insights, or orchestrating package workflows with a simple natural language prompt. No dashboards, no scripting, just a simple question or instruction that delivers the right end result. If this sounds interesting, you should 

This isn’t a launched product (yet), but it’s a clear signal of where we think Cloudsmith is headed: toward 

 that make it easier to control your software supply chain.

is a standard way to make information available to LLMs. Similar to an API, MCP provides a documented, standardized way for a client to integrate services from external sources.

MCP enables AI assistants to query and interact with software supply chain data, so it creates a foundation for smarter workflows and more accessible control over artifact management.

In essence, adding MCP capabilities to Cloudsmith offers up an entirely new interface to your software supply chain, with AI agents and LLMs working together to achieve your goals. We're exited to see MCP becoming a flexible new point of integration between our customers' third-party services and Cloudsmith.

MCP server demo

Our MCP prototype leverages Cloudsmith’s API-first architecture to provide programmatic access to developers through their AI assistant. Through standardized MCP requests, you can ask questions about your software supply chain or take safe, controlled actions - like managing policies or promoting packages - directly within Cloudsmith. This opens up conversational workflows with the Cloudsmith platform.

For example, you might ask your AI assistant to identify what package is trending up in usage month over month or see all of the versions of a particular package in use across your workspace. In the future, your AI assistant will be able to review your organization’s compliance and security requirements and recommend or create a set of policies in Cloudsmith’s Enterprise Policy Manager based on that input.

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