Today we’re thrilled to announce that Runway has been acquired by Guardsquare, the leading provider of mobile application security. Guardsquare shares our north star vision: empowering mobile teams to ship high-quality, business-critical apps with speed, security, and confidence. We’re extremely proud that they see Runway as an integral part of that shared mission and, in joining forces, we now have the fuel to build faster and further in that direction.
First and foremost, to our customers: Runway isn’t going anywhere. You can expect business as usual. Runway will continue to grow as a product, the Runway team is staying onboard to continue building together, and we’ll now be able to invest in this mission at a level we never could on our own. Read on for some background on how we got here, why this is the right next step for Runway and for mobile teams everywhere, and what comes next.
How we got here
When we started Runway five years ago, “mobile release management” wasn’t a thing. Instead, to get their apps shipped, teams were juggling noisy Slack threads, stale spreadsheets and tracking docs, rotating release manager duties that nobody on the team wanted to do, and a steady drip of late night patches and hotfixes. We lived this reality on mobile teams of our own, and it dawned on us that the problem was so normalized that most teams didn’t realize it was a problem in the first place. We gave the problem a name and made the case that the solution was bigger-picture than CI/CD.
Our conviction was that the mobile release process is a crucial ingredient in app quality and the overall health of a mobile org, and that it deserves a real platform rather than a pile of scripts. Five years later, that conviction has become a category that some of the biggest and best mobile teams in the world are investing in. Along the way we launched Rollouts, Build Distro, Rollbacks, Fixes, Triage, Flightpaths, and much more, all of which have developed Runway into the platform for shipping mobile at scale.
We’re incredibly proud of how far that idea has come, and of the team that carried it there. But there’s still a whole lot more we want to do.
The bigger vision
From day one, our north star has been the idea of a complete platform serving mobile teams at scale. With Runway, we’ve tackled important pieces of that platform; but there’s a lot more to it. And the importance of and urgency for such a platform have grown as AI changes the way mobile orgs work.
Teams are now building at AI scale. More code, more contributors (human and otherwise), more changes per release, and less actual oversight than ever before. Every mobile team is facing the same question: how do you move this fast and remain confident that what you’re shipping is stable and secure? Code is now cheap, but mistakes are as expensive as ever.
The opportunity is more relevant than ever but we need to move fast and build bigger. Which is why we decided now was the right time to team up with one of the biggest players in the mobile ecosystem.
Why Guardsquare
Guardsquare is the global leader in mobile application security. Thousands of customers across every major industry rely on Guardsquare to harden their apps, test them for vulnerabilities, and detect threats in real time.
Their leadership in the mobile space was compelling in its own right, but what really drew us to Guardsquare was our shared conviction that mobile teams shouldn’t have to trade speed for app integrity and security. Guardsquare understands the unique challenges that mobile presents, and shares our belief that developers need the ability to release secure, high-quality apps without friction. Runway helps teams achieve more frequent and consistent release cycles, and ship fixes and rollbacks more quickly, all of which contribute to a strong security posture. Plus, no mature release process is complete without built-in security checks and monitoring and, together, Guardsquare and Runway offer exactly that.
What this means for Runway customers
The short version: your Runway experience will be unchanged. Except that you’ll start seeing even more exciting developments in the platform, and have access to additional tools that will help you set your app quality and security bar even higher.
- Runway continues as Runway. Same product, same integrations, same support. Nothing to migrate and no action needed on your end.
- More investment, not less. Joining Guardsquare gives us the resources and the runway (sorry) to go further and move faster on our existing roadmap, as well as tackle new challenges we weren’t able to tackle previously.
- New capabilities. You’ll have new ways to secure your apps and to build security into your release process.
If you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, please get in touch via Slack, Teams, or email (support@runway.team).
Thank you!
To our customers: thank you for trusting us with one of the most critical parts of your day-to-day. It’s a privilege to work alongside you and your teams and to play a part in shipping apps used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Your buy-in and feedback has helped shape Runway into what it is, and set us up for this next big step. Many of you have been with us since our earliest days and we hope that this moment resonates in some small way for you all as well.
To the Runway team, past and present: you got us here, and you made the journey fun and fulfilling. You built a new category and you did it with a level of care and craft we’re extremely proud of.
To our investors, and now Guardsquare: thank you for believing in the vision, and for providing the fuel needed to get that into the hands of the entire mobile world.
We’re grateful, we’re excited, and we can’t wait to show you where Runway goes from here. See you on release day.
Gabriel, Matt, and Dave
Co-founders, Runway
