WP Engine closes $1.2m in Series A financing
You might have heard by now that WP Engine just closed a Series A. Here’s the official press release:
Austin, Texas (PRWEB) November 15, 2011
WP Engine, the WordPress hosting and security service for bloggers and small businesses, today announced the closing of their Series A round of venture financing.
The $1.2 M investment was led by Silverton Partners from Austin, TX, and includes angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling and others. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also participated with a strategic investment.
Automattic today also announced VIP Support for Web Hosts, a new partner program for web hosts that excel at hosting WordPress sites and blogs. WP Engine is the launch partner for the program.
Kip McClanahan, a partner at Silverton, joins WP Engine’s board of directors.
This round of funding allows WP Engine to further recruit for and scale its product and customer happiness teams, which are comprised of the very best WordPress developers and consultants. The company also plans to ramp partner relations with other elite WordPress service providers.
WP Engine has grown rapidly since its launch in 2010 and now has an install base of over 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs.
WP Engine leads the managed WordPress hosting segment with fastest page-load times, scalability, security and a staff of WordPress experts. Additionally, WP Engine provides all customers with a managed CDN for static content delivery, full daily backups, a complimentary staging area, and consultation on themes and plugins.
“We’re devoted to providing the absolute best customer service and the investment from Silverton allows us to expand the WP Engine platform with the right people to support our growing customer base,” said Jason Cohen, founder and CEO of WP Engine. “Our roadmap balances building out the features, add-on services and high-touch support teams that customers ask for the most, while avoiding services creep, which is critical. We want to remain the fastest and simplest WordPress hosting company, period. Trust in this business is everything.”
Because of the one-stop approach, WP Engine works closely with a network of top WordPress consultants to provide them with the tools they need to get client sites up and running faster than they could alone.
“We’re excited to add WP Engine to our portfolio of leading Texas technology companies,” said Kip McClanahan, a Partner at Silverton. “WP Engine is helping to build out a high-touch platform and services ecosystem for bloggers and consultants, so everyone can focus on what they do best. There is a big opportunity between the plethora of lightweight, downstream hosting companies that casually talk about WordPress on their marketing pages, and Automattic’s VIP program, which is for only the largest sites and services. WP Engine is for anyone who is serious about WordPress, but not yet ready for VIP.”
WP Engine was founded to be the fastest and easiest way to keep your content or commerce-based blog up and running at optimal speed. Key features include:
- Page-load acceleration
- Top-tier security and immediate resolution of any breech
- Scaling through spikes
- Theme and plugin consulting
- One-click staging and backup
- Month to month payment without lock-in
New users with any size blog (even into millions of page views) can sign up for a 15-day free WP Engine trial at https://wpengine.com/plans/ . Monthly plans start at $50 per month.
About WP Engine:
WP Engine is the premier, fully-managed WordPress hosting company. We serve 100,000,000 requests daily, each one carefully and continuously tuned for speed, scalability, and security. We’re beloved by hundreds of bloggers from huge, popular sites down to small company home pages who care about their SEO ranking and their users’ experience. Best of all is our tech support, where only WordPress experts answer questions.
For more information, visit https://wpengine.com/.
About Silverton Partners:
We are an early-stage venture capital firm focused on Texas-based companies. Our culture is people-driven which leads us to partner with exceptional entrepreneurs who are committed to attacking growth markets with proprietary products or services. We are typically the first institutional and lead investor in the companies we back.
For more information, visit http://www.silvertonpartners.com/
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