We’ve raised $72m in Series C financing, led by TCV and Insight Partners, 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.

Cloudsmithers love creating 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.

This change is exciting. It should be exciting!

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.

Software is becoming easier to create than to trust.

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.

There were easier ways to build Cloudsmith. But we had the conviction that artifact management is what ultimately mattered most. We chose to focus on the fundamentals: simple by design, secure by default, and genuinely cloud-native. We also chose to build a multi-tenant-only platform that would benefit everyone plugged into it. That was not always the cheapest approach, nor was it always the obvious one. But we believed it was the right one.

Lee Skillen

Co-founder & CTO, Cloudsmith

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.

GitHub showed at Octoverse 2025 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.

The tj-actions/changed-files compromise 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 compromised (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.

And our partners are in agreement:

• “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." — Don Johnson, CEO, Docker
• “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.” — Morgan Gerlak, Partner, TCV
• “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

Customers, of course, are the real proof. 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.

Cloudsmith just works - whether it’s failover, automation, or support. It’s the first platform we’ve used that feels like a true partner in how we build and operate software.

Michael Boldischar

Software Engineering Manager, Thrivent

We built Cloudsmith for this moment

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.

When we started, artifact management was not a sexy part of developer infrastructure. It was seen as low value. Open source was ‘free’. But we could see the risks emerging as more and more software teams increasingly relied on packages, registries, and automation. That dependency is now massive, and so is our responsibility.

Alan Carson

Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudsmith

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.

That’s enough pontificating for now.

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