Infield has announced $3M in funding for its comprehensive open-source dependency manager. The round was led by Foundation Capital with participation of YCombinator and Firsthand Alliance.
The move will make Infield create open-source dependency upgrades safer and more efficient.
Software organizations use hundreds of open source packages, from small utilities to whole platforms. The average software application depends on over 500 open source components. These packages and dependencies can get updated frequently, fixing security issues or improving reliability and performance. However, installing all dependency updates in the right order can be a headache. Some updates include “breaking changes”, which can cause systems to stop working unless other changes or updates are made first.
“Engineers want to be running on the latest, newest open source versions, but it’s just so much to keep track of,” said Steve Pike, founder and CEO of Infield. “Sometimes there are dozens of updates a week and you don’t know which ones are important and which might cause problems. On the other hand, the longer you wait, the harder it gets as the dependency updates multiply.”
Infield is the first open-source dependency update manager that’s focused on identifying breaking changes. Infield employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to ingest changelogs and spot any signs that a particular update could cause issues, combined with the company’s deep database of popular open-source packages and users’ experiences in upgrading them.
Infield manages the details of dependency updates, remediating breaking changes where required, as well as figuring out the optimal order for updates. Once connected for the first time, Infield quickly scans a company’s dependencies and creates the pull requests needed to get up to date, even if the update backlog is months or years long.
Infield was founded by Steve and Allison Pike, former CTO and COO of SevenFifty, and Andrew Lenehan, a second time founder. Steve was working as a consultant helping companies manage their dependency upgrades when he realized that a software solution could help automate the process. The remote-first company already has several paying customers.