Today, HeroDevs announced its successful $125 million strategic growth investment from PSG — one of the largest first rounds of funding in Utah history.
Founded in 2018, HeroDevs is a relatively young company based in Sandy, Utah. It has over 1,000 customers and serves one-third of the Fortune 100 companies and hundreds of others. HeroDevs has achieved profitability year over year and was included last year as the top Utah-based company on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
The following is a Q&A with HeroDevs founder and CEO Aaron Frost.
After seven years in business, what made you decide to fundraise?
We’ve amassed over 1,000 customers, and the number of demands is a number we can’t keep up with at the current scale. We really need to pour on a lot of size into the business in order to expand into more technologies. So [it was] just kind of waking up and realizing, “Hey, this is pivotal for the company.” No one has ever gotten here in open source, and if we want to be the ones that are here in 100 years, we need to grow very, very quickly.
You’ve said open source companies don’t normally get this big. What’s different about HeroDevs?
When I look at a lot of other competitors, they have one product. They don’t know the other things as well as they know their first product, but HeroDevs believed we could get other experts to join us, and then we could [be experts in] that thing. I think we turned a corner where most people stop at a product. I do think, cosmically, our first product was just the right shot at the moon, because we piled on a lot of ARR in six months — more than most Utah companies will pile on in a decade, and that was wild.
Part of your funding is reserved for giving back. Tell me more about that.
Part of our historical growth is giving back to the community. We built a pretty sizable fund into this round where we give back to the open source communities and say, “Hey, here’s 20 million that you guys can come and get.” It’s growth for us, but it’s also growth for the open source community.
What was the gap in the market that you originally saw when you started HeroDevs? What gave you the confidence to go after your dream?
It was very pragmatic. We were consultants. We were fingers to keyboard, migrating [customers] from old versions of open source to new versions. Google had this old version (Angular JS) that we were great at migrating from, but they killed it … and that was a problem for me. So I said, “Hey, what if we copy that version — the last version they ever ship — and we keep it secure after?” … We told Google we were going to do it, and they told everyone else. By the end of the year, Capital One was banging down my door, and NASA and the NBA, and every Fortune 100 I could have imagined. And not just that, but governments — the United Nations and European Union. I never thought that I’d be able to tell my mom that happened to me.
So, the product is open source. Some people get stuck on the old versions [of open source]. They’re financially handcuffed and have to stay on these old versions because they need the old stuff that they started with 10 years ago to stay safe. And that is what we do. We keep all versions of end-of-life software safe for people who need a longer runway before that plane takes off and they’re ready to migrate.
Why does PSG believe in what you’re doing?
In February, PSG announced an $8 billion fund. They’re very much wanting to lean further into tech and tech-enabled services. Luckily for us, we are pretty meticulously data-oriented, and we use Domo as our DI (data integration) platform. The amount of data we know about our business is phenomenal compared to other people our size, so telling the story when you have data the way we do is actually pretty chill. When PSG walked in, they saw that everything was up and to the right, and we’ve got three years of these trends. I also think PSG saw a team that they trusted and wanted to invest in, and that was a very therapeutic moment for me.
What is this funding going to enable you to do?
It’s all about putting more products that are meaningful to enterprises into our catalog in a shorter amount of time. This is all about doing what we were already going to do in a much shorter time frame. The other part of it is creating recognition of the HeroDevs brand.
