Breakout Startups PRO #25- Netlify
The silent behemoth in the Developer Community
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Let’s dive straight into today’s Edition now. Today, we are talking about Netlify, the startup very quietly becoming a behemoth in the developer ecosystem.
About
Every startup begins out as a side project and Netlify can be classified as one of them.
In 2013, Mathias Biilmann noticed the increasing adoption of static websites while running MakerLoop, a content management startup based in San Francisco.
In 2015, Mathias joined hands with Christian Bach from Denmark to join him in building Netlify and launched it as a MakerLoop product.
PS:- Netlify is still listed as one of the Makerloop’s products on the website.
Product
Netlify is a Platform as a Service that builds, deploys, and hosts static websites and apps.
The company has built a unified platform that automates code to create high-performant, easily-maintainable sites and web-apps. By unifying the elements of the modern decoupled web, from local development to advanced edge logic.
Traction
Initially, Netlify was focused on hosting static sites only. Due to this, the tool quickly attracted high-profile open-source users, but the founding team wanted it to be more than just another web hosting firm; they sought to make static sites viable for interactive websites. And they seem to have gotten pretty successful in doing that.
At the time of the company’s Series A, the company was breaking records being viral in the developer community.
Netlify already had 75,000 developers, growing at about 200 per day. Today, over 100,000 developers use Netlify, growing over 300 per day — running over 300,000 web projects and delivering 2.5 billion web requests a month. All this, on seed funding alone.(Source)
According to the latest reports, Netlify is used by more than 800,000 web developers and businesses. The platform provides modern build workflows, serverless functions, and a global Application Delivery Network to deliver the most performant, secure and scalable websites and applications.
The company’s customer base includes companies such as Google, Facebook, Samsung, Nike, Cisco, Atlassian, Peloton, Kubernetes and Sequoia Capital.
The company is also behind JAMstack category, a modern web architecture that marries the best practices of static sites with the API economy and serverless functions, to deliver the faster load times and dynamic content, without worrying about web servers.
On the employee headcount, Netlify has grown from 38 to 97 employees since the beginning of last year and hopes to reach 180 by year’s end.
Road Ahead for Netlify
The company is already a darling of several developer communities on the Internet but plans to focus more on onboarding enterprises with the new funding. For this, the company will be working to enable more use cases at scale in 2020, such as more control and better collaboration for larger teams. Essentially, the company wants the JAMstack to work at scale with the services they need as enterprise customers look to migrate major parts of their web infrastructure to Netlify.
It will be interesting to see how the company goes ahead doubling down on its vision of “replacing all web servers with a global application delivery network”.
Funding
In the Techcrunch article, Netlify’s Founder & CEO, Mathias Biilmann was quoted as saying
“We weren’t looking for new funding, but felt with the company growing rapidly, it would be prudent to take the money to help continue that growth.”
So far, Netlify has raised a total of $97M in funding.
The most recent round, a Series C of $53M was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins and newcomer Preston-Werner Ventures.
Prior to this, the company had raised a Series B of $30M.
Prior to this, the company had raised a Series A & Seed round of $12M & $2.1M respectively.
The team also has been able to bring in several marquee people from the developer community on board which includes people such as e Adam Wiggins (founder of Heroku) Tom Preston-Werner, (founder of GitHub, creator of Gravatar, Toml, Semantic Versioning and of Jekyll: the most popular static site generator), Todd Morey (founder of Rackspace Cloud and Creative Director of Openstack).
Competition
Netlify is largely the market leader when it comes to static website deployment but a good number of competitors have started coming up in the past few years.
Some of them are👇
Team
Mathias Biilmann- Founder & CEO of Netlify, Open Source Contributor to projects such as Netlify CMS, Ruby on Rails, JRuby.
Christian Bach- Founder & President, Netlify. Advisor, Chroma.
Jobs at Netlify
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