Pantheon CEO Zach Rosen announced this morning that they’ve raised $21.5 million in financing.
I covered Pantheon, including an interview, just recently when they launched their WordPress product. As I said then, Pantheon is a very compelling product.
Seeing this raise another round of funding is interesting, and this is quite a chunk of money. Their first round was for $5 million. I was most intrigued though by Zach’s stated goal in the blog post.
Our platform now runs 65,000 Drupal and WordPress websites serving billions of monthly page-views. We are making measurable progress toward our goal of powering 30% of the web.
A goal to power 30% of the web is ambitious at minimum. I assume they mean 30% of the top 1 million websites or 10 million websites though. Beyond that doesn’t seem to be their target audience. Still, that would be quite an achievement.
I recently noted that they were doing a lot of “selling”. After I wrote about Pantheon, I was overwhelmed by re-targeting ad campaigns, promoted Twitter ads, various drip email campaigns after signing up for their platform, and direct mail from various Pantheon team members. It’s obvious to me that they are ready to grow and know how to do it. Even if it was a bit annoying, it was mostly well executed advertising.
Pantheon is barely two years old. They are proving, yet again, that an ambitious and well-funded team can disrupt the hosting space quite quickly. However, what will really tell the story is how they stand the test of the scale itself.
Will they be able to maintain their quality of service and support once their team gets into the hundreds and they have tens of thousands of clients and hundreds of thousands of websites on their platform? We’ll see, and I’m excited to watch.
