Elementor has seen explosive growth in their WordPress-based page building application since its release in May 2016, now boasting more than 4 million installs of the free version of the plugin.

The paid version of Elementor was introduced in November 2016, with a common freemium upgrade model. The Elementor community has taken off, furthering the product’s growth and loyalty among freelancers, DIYers, and site wranglers.

In such a crowded space as WordPress page building plugins, and especially considering core WordPress efforts via Gutenberg, Elementor’s meteoric rise is an incredible accomplishment.

Others have taken notice. In their Series A fundraising event, Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading a $15 million round. Elementor has been working on raising money since at least the second quarter of 2019, so this news is a long time coming.

Edit: Envato was rumored to be investing as well. I’ve confirmed with Envato that while they are working closely with Elementor on some projects, they are not an investor in this round.

Elementor has an opportunity to do a lot of interesting stuff with these funds — inside the WordPress experience, and I suspect independent of WordPress as well.

I expect to see a fully hosted version of Elementor’s site building capabilities where WordPress is (at least partially) hidden from the view of the user. They are currently hiring for their “Cloud team” which is tasked with “building, maintaining, and supporting the company ‘Cloud Hosting SaaS Solution’.”

What has made Elementor stand out thus far is its relative intuitiveness and the establishment of a very loyal following — mostly lured in with extremely attractive pricing of the “Pro” product ($49 per site, or only $199 for unlimited sites), and a very generously featured free tier.

Not many WordPress-centric companies have raised money. I’m very interested to see where Elementor chooses to take the product from here. They certainly have both the momentum and the backing to do something big.

With a team based in Israel, Elementor has more than 100 employees now working on the product and support. This raise will surely enable them to extend their runway while maintaining an attractive price point for the paid product and assist in the development of their next major release.

Post Status was not included in the embargoed list of news sources to report this story. We became aware of the news through our own means and decided to report on it now.