According to the Gigaom article “Typesafe Gets $14M to Push Scala Language as A Better Java than Java” new funding from Shasta Ventures and Juniper Networks will help to give Scala a big boost.  Typesafe, which is the brains behind the Java-compatible open source Scala computing language, has been awarded $14 million dollars for Scala.  Currently Scala can be seen in mostly web-scale apps but Typesafe hopes to introduce Scala to enterprise applications.  Mark Brewer, the CEO of Typesafe made the following comment.

We will build out the commercial engineering team and in more developer outreach to make sure they know about this stack and who Typesafe is.

Though Scala is not a large part of enterprise applications, some businesses do choose it over Java.  TypeSafe will use the fund to continue to expand Scala and its Akka framework to not only be viable in the enterprise application world but also to possible overtake the very popular Java.  Brewer stated:

A year ago most of the apps [using Scala] were scale-out big web applications like Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn but in that time we started seeing more traditional business applications where developers chose Scala over Java. Many developers find Scala more lightweight and streamlined than Java itself.

Jason Pressman is currently a Shasta managing director and he will be joining the Typsesafe board.  Shasta is no stranger to open source companies and in the past has financially backed flourishing companies such as LucidWorks.  Java has been one of the go-to languages for enterprise applications for years but Shasta definitely seems to have a successful track record.  Only time will tell if Shasta can keep up the pace and become the new and improved Java.

April Holmes, September 19, 2012

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