Verified employee & interview reviews

LaunchDarkly Reviews

Oakland, California

4.7/ 5

3 reviews

LaunchDarkly is a software company that provides a leading feature management platform designed to de-risk software releases, ensure targeted experiences, facilitate product experimentation, and optimize mobile releases. Founded in 2014 by college classmates Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, the company is headquartered in Oakland, California, and maintains a remote-first work environment. The co-founders started the company to streamline feature management and eliminate the late, stressful nights associated with software launches, establishing the first scalable feature management platform in the industry. Feature management allows development teams to innovate faster by fundamentally transforming how software is delivered to customers. By wrapping new or risky sections of code with a feature flag, a practice known as "dark launching," developers can gradually release software features to any segment of users on any platform. If a feature causes issues in production, it can be automatically disabled or rolled back independently of code deployment. LaunchDarkly's platform generates analytics around release quality, velocity, and risk, while providing context-aware targeting and real-time visibility. Its streaming architecture employs a third-party content delivery network (CDN) to ensure feature flag updates are delivered to all servers and clients within 200 milliseconds, ensuring rapid application initialization without reducing client-side performance. The platform scales extensively, evaluating peaks of 20 to 45 trillion feature flags daily. LaunchDarkly serves over 5,500 customers globally, including major brands like Autodesk, Paramount Studios, and Christian Dior, as well as approximately 25% of the Fortune 500. While the platform initially focused on code deployment for developers, its utility has expanded to include marketing and business operations teams for targeted user activations. To support its growth, the company has actively expanded its product capabilities. For instance, LaunchDarkly introduced AI Configs to customize and test large language models within AI applications. Additionally, the company completed key strategic acquisitions, incorporating the application monitoring platform Highlight.io and the warehouse-native product analytics provider Houseware as subsidiaries. As a private entity, LaunchDarkly operates within the Software Development Applications and DevOps sectors under its corporate name, Catamorphic Co. The company has raised a total of $330 million in funding over seven rounds from prominent institutional investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Insight Partners, Lead Edge Capital, and 500 Global. Its latest major funding event was a $200 million Series D round closed in August 2021, which established the company's valuation at $3 billion. LaunchDarkly employs roughly 450 to 640 individuals and is regularly recognized on industry lists such as the Forbes Cloud 100, InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year, and the Enterprise Tech 30.