September 23, 2019

FOSSA Acquires Dawn Labs

It’s been more than two years since we started Dawn Labs from our frigid, college apartments in Madison, Wisconsin. In that time, our vision to create a product studio where we could explore our shared passions for technology together has come a long way. We’ve had the chance to work with organizations big and small to craft memorable digital experiences ranging from websites and apps to full blown brands and products.

One such organization we’ve had the opportunity to partner with has been FOSSA. FOSSA’s mission is to enable the open source ecosystem at enterprise scale. Open source is the software industry’s most powerful feedback loop, and FOSSA helps large organizations adopt it ethically and securely at scale. On top of that, we’ve simply had a great time working with them over the past year.

Which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Dawn Labs has been acquired by FOSSA. After working closely with their team for the past few months, we’re overjoyed to finally share this development with you all. While it’s always hard to close the chapter on something that took years and many long nights to build, we could not be more excited to play a part in charting the future here at FOSSA.

What does this mean for Carbon?

Carbon was our first major open source project and in the years since its inception, it has become the community standard for sharing images of source code. With over 21,000 GitHub stars and 50,000 monthly active users, Carbon has grown beyond what we could have ever imagined. As such, making sure Carbon continues to thrive is of the utmost importance. To ensure this, Carbon will remain a completely independent, community-run open source project with Mike at its helm. If you haven’t already seen the exciting Carbon updates of late, head over to the shiny new GitHub organization or subscribe to Carbon Copy for weekly news from the maintaining team.

Thank You

Before we leave, we wanted to take a moment to thank some of those who made our Dawn journey possible in the first place. Starting a company was quite a leap for us at the time and without the privilege and community we were fortunate enough to have our adventure would never have carried us to where it has today. We really appreciate Matt Younkle and Jack Parmer, for taking big bets on us early on. We also want to thank Johannes Schickling, Guillermo Rauch, and the rest of the ZEIT team for serving as inspiration at the beginning and as partners by the end. Lastly but certainly not least, we want to give a huge shout out to our teammate, Sean Rabaut, for not only taking a massive leap of faith to join a fully remote team in its infancy, but also being everything we could have asked for and more in a teammate.