A recent developer survey from Stack Overflow (Stack Exchange Inc.) shows that only 4 percent of professional programmers use the scalable language Scala in their projects. That’s a far cry from the 38 percent market share of Java, the go-to language in the enterprise, but investors believe there’s a lot of potential for growth.

A consortium consisting of IBM Corp., Intel Corp. and four venture capital funds today led a $15 million funding round into Lightbend Inc., the startup co-founded by Scala creator Martin Odersky. The firm offers a development platform designed to help organizations harness the language’s unique features to build better software applications.

Scala is a more natural choice for enterprises than many other languages thanks to its interoperability with Java. Developers may freely mix code written in the two languages and reuse many components, from individual libraries to entire frameworks. This means that a company can manage Scala projects more or less using its existing Java development infrastructure, which makes for a fairly low entry barrier.

The reason why firms are choosing to take advantage of the languages’ interoperability is that Scala addresses several common gripes with its sister syntax. It’s among other more concise, which allows developers to implement certain types of application logic with much less code than Java. Lightbend’s Reactive Platform expands upon Scala’s baked-in advantages with several value-added components designed to further streamline projects.

At the core of the offering is an open-source framework called Akka that automates many of the minutiae involved in making an application run efficiently on a large scale. It’s complemented by tools that aim to address other time-consuming aspects of software development such as code optimization, adding integrations with third-party services and release management.

Moreover, Lightbend claims that its platform can reduce overhead once an application is in production, thanks to a set of built-in administrative controls. The software lets operations staff fine-tune how a workload is distributed across their companies’ infrastructure and monitor activity for potential problem indicators. They can also configure alerts to notify them if an application goes offline, starts consuming too many resources or experiences some other unusual event.

Lightbend’s technology is being used at several Fortune 500 companies as well as many smaller organizations. Notable customers include Amazon.com Inc., Starbucks Corp., IBM Corp. and NASA. 

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