After $40M Series D, Pantheon Acquires A WebOps Company For Automated Updates

Coming off a fresh $40 million Series D, web services company Pantheon has acquired Staging Pilot to help roll out automated updates to the multitude of sites it manages.

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Pantheon, which has $96.8 million in known funding to-date, helps manage open-source content sites like WordPress and Drupal. It currently manages over 280,000 websites, it said.

Pantheon told me that it’s working with more large-scale site portfolios. Its customers, for example Yale and Clorox, own thousands of websites and require a certain infrastructure to govern and update them all. Staging Pilot will help it “autopilot” feature updates, product testing and work as a safety net for whether a feature is broken or not.

“The industry wants to be thinking in terms of websites, not a website,” said Josh Koenig, head of product and co-founder for Pantheon.

Pantheon customers are spending days or even weeks making sure their updates are safe, Koenig said, so the new acquisition hopefully targets that pain point for its customers. We’ve written about the demands of automation with coding and updating before (see Harness).

“Every tech team that you know is bottlenecked on developer time,” he said. “With Staging Pilot, we can unlock an enormous amount of developer time that is currently doing this toily drudgework type of desk work. Make the robots do that work.”

For its size, some say that investment in the content management space isn’t active enough, but Koenig said he’s happy with the pace of innovation within his industry.

“I think the challenge is that people reflexively think of the web as a legacy technology, that its not a tech-first platform” he said. However, he’s seeing renewed interest in technologies to better manage and innovate in web tech because it’s “the only thing that is everywhere.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias