Company: LaunchDarkly
Founder: Edith Harbaugh
Website: https://launchdarkly.com/
About LaunchDarkly
When did you start?
After experiencing software launches that turned into stressful late nights, LaunchDarkly co-founders John Kodumal and Edith Harbaugh knew there had to be a better way.
Drawing on their experiences at companies including Atlassian and TripIt, they saw software teams relying on fragile in-house tools and manual processes that made deployments risky and experimentation difficult. LaunchDarkly was founded in 2014 to separate deployment from release, giving teams the ability to safely test, control and iterate on software in production.
Twelve years later, LaunchDarkly helps some of the world’s biggest companies gain greater control over software launches and deeper insight into how users experience their products. Trusted by 25% of Fortune 500 companies, LaunchDarkly employs more than 450 people and evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily.
What challenges have you overcome?
LaunchDarkly has had to evolve at the pace of a rapidly changing market. AI-native software development has made quality, safety and performance far less predictable than in traditional applications. As a result, the company has adapted proven principles such as feature management, experimentation, observability and rollback to an environment where agents, prompts and models behave dynamically.
What impact on the US ecosystem has the company had?
LaunchDarkly began as a way to make software releases safer, pioneering the feature management category and giving engineering teams control over what code reached users without needing to redeploy. That approach now underpins how a large share of the largest technology and financial companies in the US ship software, including a quarter of the Fortune 500.
As AI reshapes how software gets built, LaunchDarkly is extending that same discipline further. CodeControl helps teams ship AI-generated code with progressive rollouts and automatic recovery, while AgentControl gives teams a single place to govern how AI agents and models behave once they are live, adjusting or rolling back behaviour in real time rather than waiting on a redeploy. Together, they mark a shift in where control sits: not at the moment code ships, but at the moment it is running in front of customers.
By helping engineering teams move at AI speed without losing the ability to catch and fix problems as they happen, LaunchDarkly is helping keep US software delivery fast and dependable at a moment when the cost of getting that balance wrong has never been higher.
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