Sonar, the leading platform for clean code, today announced it has raised $412 million from new and existing investors, at a valuation of $4.7 billion. The round is led by new investors Advent International and General Catalyst, with existing investor Insight Partners participating. Permira’s Growth Opportunities Fund also participated in the round.
Sonar will use the investment to grow its go-to-market team globally as the company drives toward $1 billion in revenue.
“Sonar is an outstanding business that has positioned itself as a category-defining leader in clean code, with a trusted reputation among developers and a truly differentiated solution,” said Bryan Taylor, Head of Advent’s Technology Investment Team and a Managing Partner in Palo Alto. “We are thrilled to partner with Olivier and the Sonar team as they build a major platform within the software development ecosystem, accelerating the rapid growth in their revenue and user community.”
Used by more than five million developers, Sonar’s solutions enable enterprises to maximize the value of their software by helping developers and development teams write high-standard code, which is free of bugs and security vulnerabilities, and consistent across the board. As software gets updated continuously, Sonar ensures that only clean code is embedded directly into the development process, systematically improving the overall health of the code base and meaningfully reducing tech debt. This unlocks significant resource and time savings so developers can focus on innovating, delivering better products and improving customer experience, thereby boosting key business metrics.
“Source code is the key component of software. At Sonar, we enable companies to make this source code an asset rather than a liability. This delivers huge value, especially when you know this is done as part of the development process and requires no extra effort,” said Olivier Gaudin, CEO and co-founder of Sonar. “With the market recognizing the importance of code, we have a clear path to $1 billion in revenue. Having the right people and partners around the table will help us to move swiftly toward that goal and prepare for public markets.”
“Sonar has a bold vision for transforming the way organizations build software. This vision has been clearly validated by the company’s skyrocketing customer adoption and outstanding reputation within the developer community,” said Deep Nishar, Managing Director, General Catalyst. “General Catalyst is excited to support Sonar in broadening its impact on a global stage.”
The company will use this investment to double its sales force in 2022 and grow its marketing team across existing offices in Geneva, Switzerland; Annecy, France; Bochum, Germany and Austin, Texas. The investment in sales and marketing will help the company expand its reach among the world’s 70 million software developers. In addition, Sonar will open a new regional headquarters in Singapore, allowing the company to build its business within the burgeoning APAC market.
The investment comes as Sonar continues to build rapid momentum. Key company milestones include:
- Over five million developers at more than 300,000 organizations use Sonar’s commercial and community products to improve their code quality.
- In the last four years, Sonar grew its commercial customer base by more than 2,000%.
- 80 Fortune 100 companies use the platform. IBM, Microsoft, Barclays, Alphabet and NASA are among the major organizations using Sonar today.
“As an early investor in Sonar, we’ve been extremely impressed with the company’s continuing maturity and accelerating market penetration. It comes as no surprise: enterprises everywhere need to develop code with high standards quickly, and Sonar is the only solution enabling that,” said Richard Wells, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “We’re excited to continue our collaboration with Sonar as the company enters a new stage in its growth journey.”