Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) have attempted to dominate the source code management and collaboration tools industry, but there are a number of rising players that could steal the spotlight.

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Earlier this week RhodeCode announced that it had secured $3.5 million in a round led by DFJ Esprit and Earlybird Venture Capital. As a bootstrapped company that was already profitable, Kreutzberger did not take this investment lightly.

"The best company actually doesn't need to raise venture capital, so there's always the challenge between expectation [and] time," said Kreutzberger. "What you can achieve with a certain technology in this certain kind of time depends also on timing of the market. In our case, the market is moving in our direction, so we took on venture capital to more aggressively welcome this."

RhodeCode hopes that its investment will allow the firm to capitalize on the application lifecycle management market, which is believed to be worth $21 billion.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.