Investors Serve Up $53M In Series C Funding To Web Dev Platform Netlify

Developer platform Netlify announced it has raised $53 million in a Series C funding led by EQT Ventures. Prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and Preston-Werner Ventures1 participated in the deal, which brings the San Francisco-based company’s total funding to $93 million.

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Valuations and other key financial metrics were not publicly disclosed by the company. However, in its announcement, Netlify did say that it’s tripled its customer base (to 800,000 users) and revenue year over year. The company says that 8 percent of internet users visit a Netlify-powered site each month.

In a public statement, Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Mathias Biilmann said “We started Netlify with the mission to empower developers and change the way the web is built. The growing number of developers signing onto Netlify daily and the latest investment in our business has validated that vision. With this funding we’re full-speed ahead delivering new features, investing in our enterprise-grade infrastructure and growing our team, to help more developers and businesses take advantage of the JAMstack.”

What is the JAMstack? It’s a web development architecture co-developed by Biilmann. The acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs and prebuilt Markup. Dynamic functionality is handled by client-side JavaScript; server-side operations get abstracted into composable APIs which can be called over HTTPS via JavaScript; and sites are served as static HTML which can either be written natively or be generated from source files written in Markdown format using a static site generator.2

The principal benefits the JAMstack offers to web developers is that sites can be served exclusively over a content delivery network (CDN), which improves scalability. Because a project’s entire codebase lives in a version control system like Git, and each deployment represents a snapshot of the entire site, developers are able to trace version histories and ensure consistency across an entire live site.

Netlify builds software tools that help with different aspects of JAMstack development. Netlify Dev is a local application server developers can use for building and testing their websites prior to production deployment. Netlify Build is a Git workflow for web development. Edge is Netlify’s “application delivery network” that offers features some traditional CDNs don’t.

“To enable more use cases at scale in 2020, we’re investing in new features catering to our enterprise customers, including more control and better collaboration for larger teams. We look forward to enabling the JAMstack at scale with the services they need as they look to migrate major parts of their web infrastructure to Netlify,” said co-founders Chris Bach and Matt Biilmann in a separate statement about the round.

The company offers a set of pricing tiers for tinkerers and small teams, but with this new funding the company is intent to scale out its enterprise service offerings. These include more processing power on the build side, higher speed on the deployment side, and other client services like security auditing and premium support.

“Netlify and the JAMstack are fundamentally changing how websites and web applications are built. The large and growing community of developers building on the JAMstack is testament to the movement that Matt and Chris and the team are spearheading, and to the unified platform they’ve built,” said Laura Yao of EQT Ventures.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias