Unleash

Unleash, the business name of Bricks Software AS, is an Oslo, Norway-based company that develops a feature management platform centered on feature flags. The product lets teams decouple deployment from release: code can be shipped to production with functionality gated behind flags that are turned on or off at runtime without redeployment. Core capabilities described by the company include activation strategies and strategy constraints for targeting users, gradual rollouts, kill switches, instant or "surgical" rollback of individual features, variants and payloads, release templates with milestone progression, experimentation, and monitoring [0][4][7].

The platform is offered in an open-source edition and a commercial Unleash Enterprise edition. The open-source version provides a single "Default" project and two environments (development and production), while Enterprise adds multiple projects and environments, role-based access control, change requests, single sign-on, SCIM user provisioning, audit logging, and SLA support. Both hosted (SaaS) and self-hosted deployments are supported, along with multi-region support, air-gapped and FedRAMP-oriented requirements, and a stated design principle that customer data does not leave the customer environment [0][2][3][4][5]. The system is accessed through more than 30 SDKs covering major programming languages (15 official client and server SDKs plus over 15 community SDKs per the GitHub README), an admin UI, APIs, an edge component, a Terraform provider, and integrations with tools such as GitHub, Slack, and CI/CD pipelines [2][3][5].

The company frames its category as "FeatureOps" — an operational layer above DevOps that governs how features are exposed to users after code is live, covering incremental rollout, impact measurement across technical and business metrics, and rapid disabling of problematic functionality. Recent positioning emphasizes governance and real-time control over AI-generated code, citing research from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment group that a 25% rise in AI adoption correlates with a 7% drop in software stability [0][7].

Founding story

The open-source Unleash feature management platform was developed by Ivar Østhus, who serves as Chief Technology Officer; the company operating it is Bricks Software AS, led by Chief Executive Egil Østhus [7].

Business model

Open-core: the Unleash feature management server is available as open-source software (AGPL-3.0 for the main repository, with SDKs under MIT/Apache-2.0), while a commercial Unleash Enterprise edition is sold with additional capabilities such as SSO, RBAC, change requests, SCIM, advanced security, and SLA-backed support. Enterprise is available as a managed/hosted service or self-hosted [3][5].

Paid subscriptions to Unleash Enterprise (managed or self-hosted), entered via a free 14-day cloud trial or free open-source usage; the company reported more than 500 paying customers and stated it has doubled annual recurring revenue each year since its 2022 Series A [3][5][7].

Traction

Company-reported figures include 40M+ Docker downloads, 13K+ GitHub stars (13,747 on the main repository), 100K+ monthly active users, more than 500 paying customers, and annual recurring revenue doubling each year since the 2022 Series A. Named enterprise users include Lloyds Banking Group, Prudential Financial, Wayfair, Lenovo, Mercadona Tech, Visa and Samsung Ads [0][5][6][7].

Latest developments

On 4 March 2026, Unleash announced a $35M Series B led by One Peak Partners with participation from existing investors Spark Capital, Frontline Ventures and Firstminute Capital, bringing total funding to $51.5M. Proceeds are earmarked for product innovation — notably autonomous, end-to-end feature lifecycle management — global expansion, and increased marketing and sales investment. Product messaging now centers on real-time safety, governance and auditability for AI-generated software [0][6][7].