Typesafe, the company behind the Java-compatible Scala computing language, will use $ 14 million in new Series B funding to entrench the language in enterprise applications. “We will build out the commercial engineering team and in more developer outreach to make sure they know about this stack and who Typesafe is,” said Mark Brewer CEO of the Menlo Park, Calif. company.
Typesafe CEO Mark Brewer
The new funding comes from Shasta Ventures and Juniper Networks – a Scala customer – which invested through its Junos Innovation Fund. Brewer is clearly jazzed about expanding Scala, an open source language and its associated Akka framework — beyond the web-scale applications where it’s found traction.
“A year ago most of the apps [using Scala] were scale-out big web applications like Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn but in that time we started seeing more traditional business applications where developers chose Scala over Java,” Brewer said. He said many developers find Scala more lightweight and streamlined than Java itself.
“Scala is extremely intuitive and … it is also extremely easy to access libraries from Java,” said Jason Pressman, a Shasta managing director who is now joining the Typesafe board. Shasta has a history of backing open-source-oriented companies including LucidWorks, once known as Lucid Imagination, and Makara, which was acquired by Red Hat and became the basis of its OpenShift platform as a service.
Typesafe will also continue to build out the Scala-Akka stack adding more components like the recently announced Slick database connector, which makes it easier for developers to use Scala with relational and non-relational databases.
The new funding comes a year and a half after Typesafe netted a $ 3.5 million Series A round and includes contributions from existing backers Greylock Partners and Francois Stieger.
