Release
YC W20Los Angeles, US · Founded 2019 · 26 employees · 2 known investors
Find your way into Release
159 people in our graph share verified history with the Release team — schools, employers, funds. One of them is your warm intro.
Jack Bixby Lucasunlockedknows Erik Landerholm · together at Truecar (overlapped)
knows the team · via Y Combinator
×3knows the team · via Truecar
×7knows the team · via Oregon State University
Release creates isolated staging environments for each pull request, allowing engineering teams to test code changes in parallel rather than sharing a single shared staging instance.
Also known as TBD - Project Spacedust
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W20)
Release was founded in 2019 by David Giffin, Erik Landerholm, and Tommy McClung.
DG
David GiffininCo-Founder
EL
Erik Landerholmin𝕏Co-FounderErik Landerholm is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience who previously founded companies and led software development and architecture at a public company. He is a two-time Y Combinator alum and has worked across hardware and SaaS, including ASIC design, embedded systems, and management of large engineering teams.
TM
Tommy McClungin𝕏CEO/Co-founderFounder of Release, which provides isolated staging environments for parallel code testing. McClung has experience with software development in Ruby on Rails and C/C++, as well as technical sales and team management.
Investors · 2
Founder mafia
2 people who came through Release went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 8
by search overlap
Netezza264 shared keywordsIBM is a global technology company whose business spans enterprise software (including Red Hat, HashiCorp, and Confluent), IT infrastructure such as mainframes, servers, and storage, and IT consulting services. The company is also investing heavily in quantum computing and AI-based enterprise offerings, including its Lightwell open-source software security clearinghouse and the Anderon quantum wafer foundry.
Spacelift255 shared keywordsSpacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that combines Infrastructure-as-Code, GitOps pipelines, and an AI assistant to let developers provision and manage cloud infrastructure while platform teams retain governance and control. It is offered as managed SaaS, self-hosted, on-prem/air-gapped, and FedRAMP-authorized SaaS, targeting platform and infrastructure engineering teams.
Harness202 shared keywordsHarness provides software delivery automation and infrastructure for engineering teams to deploy code reliably and efficiently. The platform serves the global software development market.
LaunchDarkly182 shared keywordsLaunchDarkly provides a feature management platform that enables development teams to release code changes safely through feature flags, detect production issues in real time, and run experiments without redeploying applications.
Warp167 shared keywordsWarp builds an agentic development environment that began as a re-imagined terminal and now lets developers dispatch AI agents to write, deploy, and debug software. The product targets software developers as a coding-agent workbench.
Docker161 shared keywordsDocker provides containerization and application development platform tools including sandboxes, governance, and security solutions for developers.
BrowserStack146 shared keywordsBrowserStack provides a cloud-based software testing platform for scaling test automation across 3,500+ browser-device combinations on a real device cloud, aimed at development and QA teams. Its offerings cover cross-browser and browser automation testing, WCAG accessibility compliance testing, AI-driven test management, and visual testing, with integrations for major frameworks and CI/CD pipelines.
Northflank140 shared keywordsNorthflank is a developer platform for deploying and running application workloads across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google) and bare-metal without infrastructure management or vendor lock-in. It targets software engineers and ops teams building and shipping cloud-native applications.
Companies competing with Release for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Fierce Biotech Fundraising Tracker '26: AdvanCell adds $315M; Draig draws down $65Mfiercebiotech.com · Jul 2026Frequently asked questions
- What does Release do?
- Release creates isolated staging environments for each pull request, allowing engineering teams to test code changes in parallel rather than sharing a single shared staging instance.
- Who founded Release?
- Release was founded by David Giffin, Erik Landerholm, Tommy McClung in 2019.
- Who are Release's investors?
- Release's investors include CRV (Charles River Ventures), Y Combinator.
- Where is Release headquartered?
- Release is headquartered in Los Angeles, US.