FOSSA Acquires StackShare in Strategic Move to Expand Governance and Security Tools

The open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has announced the acquisition of StackShare, a community of developers with over 1.5 million members, as confirmed to TechCrunch. StackShare is one of the main destinations for developers to discuss, track, and share tools used in building applications, from JavaScript frameworks to cloud providers.

Founded by Yonas Beshawred, StackShare was created to help developers choose the best technologies to build web applications. The company raised $12 million from investors like Precursor Ventures, Headline, and Gold House Ventures, and accumulated more than 1.5 million registered developers, 50,000 company profiles, 800,000 monthly active users, and around 30 enterprise customers before being acquired. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Pitchbook estimated StackShare's valuation at around $20 million.

FOSSA, valued at over $100 million, provides end-to-end governance for third-party code. The company started by allowing developers to see which open source licenses they were using in their products. The expectation is that the absorption of StackShare will expose FOSSA's governance and security solutions to a broader set of developer tools.

Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA, emphasized the need for better visibility and management of developer tools within organizations as the software supply chain becomes more complex. "Insights from the StackShare community are invaluable in helping companies understand and protect their developer tools," Wang said.

Yonas Beshawred will join FOSSA as the new head of product, but the StackShare team will not be part of the transition. Beshawred highlighted the support of investors and friends during the merger process, emphasizing the importance of support from influential figures in the Black community, such as Aston Motes, the first Dropbox employee, and Baron Davis, former basketball player.

"We built a product used by over 40 million developers because we were solving a really interesting and valuable problem," Beshawred said. He hopes that this success inspires more Black founders to pursue innovations in the developer tools and enterprise space.