This Startup Wants To Replace Microsoft, IBM

Microsoft Corporation MSFT and International Business Machines Corp. 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.

One of them is RhodeCode, an enterprise-grade code collaboration platform. Co-founded by Sebastian Kreutzberger and Marcin Kuzminski, RhodeCode was commercialized after the company realized that its open source project was being used by some of the top organizations in the world. Cisco Systems, Inc., Raytheon Company, CA, Inc., the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Department of Energy are just a few of RhodeCode's many users.

"We learned that it would be a mistake not to accelerate," Kreutzberger, who also serves as RhodeCode's CEO, told Benzinga. "That's why we took on venture capital. We were already a profitable, revenue-generating company. We only took on the amount of capital that we actually needed to scale the company to 50 people. We are currently at 25. At the end of the year, beginning of next year, we [will] have 50 and we will use this money to, in the end, add features to this product and build a bigger monetization around the product."

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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.