Tidelift, a company founded by former Red Hat staff which aims to provide sustainable funding to open source projects, has announced a $25 million Series B funding round – on top of $15 million it raised last year.

“Tidelift makes it possible for open source creators to get paid for doing the work they love,” explains co-founder Donald Fischer of his company. “By delivering the support and assurances that professional teams who use their software need, creators can get a new source of income to support their work. In September we opened the doors for any open source project to sign up to participate in Tidelift, surpassing $1 million in guaranteed income for many projects in the JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP communities.

“In the few months since that announcement, open source creators—both individuals and teams—who collectively maintain thousands of open source packages including Apache Struts, Nokogiri, Mongoose, Setuptools, Project Lombok, Joda-Time, Pillow, PromiseKit, and Beautiful Soup, have joined alongside the maintainers of projects like Vue, Material-UI, Babel, Gulp, Fabric, Active Admin, Doctrine, and StandardJS to participate in Tidelift. More than 35 million open source repositories now depend on packages that are included in the Tidelift Subscription.”

The Tidelift platform works in a similar way to Medium’s subscription-based publication model: Users of open-source packages are invited to pay a subscription fee to Tidelift, which is then shared out amongst the maintainers of the packages they use. In exchange, subscribers receive a dashboard which provides security alerts, licence compliance monitoring, maintenance alerts, and direct access to quality-controlled security updates.

“Open source doesn’t just need ‘funding.’ It needs a better business model that works for creators and users alike, at massive scale,” claims Donald. “This investment in Tidelift enables us to make that business model possible. We’re thrilled to have the support of investors who are fully aligned with our commitment to the open source community, business strategy, long-term vision, and values.”

More information is available from the company’s official announcement.