Netlify CEO and co-founder Matt Biilmann points out that the whole chicken sandwich war waged online between Popeyes and other fast food chains was only made possible with his company's products.
"All of that ran on Netlify's infrastructure," Biilmann told Business Insider. "The whole workflow around it made them move with agility."
Indeed, Popeyes' parent Restaurant Brands International is one of Netlify's customers. Netlify is known for building JAMstack, a product that makes it easy for users to develop and host websites without having to manage or run web servers themselves. The websites themselves are hosted on cloud like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud — but Netlify streamlines it all away, so the web developer doesn't have to so much as set up an account with those providers to get their website up and running.
Now, Netlify's products are used by over 800,000 developers and businesses, including Facebook, Google, Loblaw, and Unilever.
"Over the last year, big players are starting to say this is the way the world is moving," Biilmann said. "We've established a strong first-mover advantage."
On the tails of that growth, Netlify announced Wednesday that it raised $53 million in Series C funding led by EQT Ventures Fund, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. In total, Netlify has raised $97 million.
Along with the funding, Laura Yao, deal partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures, will join Netlify's board of directors.
'At the end of the day, we want to make a better web'
Biilmann and Netlify president and cofounder Christian Bach are longtime friends who grew up together in Denmark. When they started Netlify, they found that building web applications is often difficult to scale and involves many redundant steps — and saw an opportunity in fixing the problem for developers.
"Both of us have decades of experience in building for the web, knowing the problems and issues for developers in productivity, performance, and scalability," Biilmann said. "We were cobbling that with seeing these new opportunities to solve a lot of issues for developer productivity."
Bach and Biilmann say right now, many developers are still stuck in the mindset that they should just build websites themselves, rather than relying on products like Netlify that make it a lot easier.
For example, Biilmann recalls that at a conference, a developer went to Netlify's booth and said that he works at a company that uses the product. Originally, that developer used Netlify for his own site, and when he suggested using it for a company project, originally his team was hesitant. Eventually, he won the company over because they saw how much faster it was.
"At the end of the day, we want to make a better web," Bach said. "It's faster, it's safer, and it's more scalable. It's a win-win-win. That requires that we do a good job. It also requires the ecosystem evolving around this...What we want to do is keep our first movers advantage."
'Netlify was not built for exits'
Netlify says that it has tripled its customer base and revenue year-over-year, although it did not disclose its revenue. It estimates that now, 8% of Internet users visit a Netlify-powered website each month. And recently, Netlify was on Wing Venture Capital's Enterprise Tech 30 list, its list of the most promising enterprise tech companies.
With the funding, Netlify plans to build new features for its suite of products made for business users, forge technology partnerships, and expand its reach to Europe.
Bach says Netlify also plans to grow its team from 100 to 180 people by the end of the year. He's hired some former founders who had exits in the last three months to sign on and help take the company to the next level, he says.
"They're here because they believe in the potential," Bach told Business Insider.
That being said, Bach says Netlify is not currently looking for any specific exit, either IPO or acquisition, at the moment.
"Netlify was not built for exits," Bach said. "It was built for how far we can get to make the web better...There are 800,000 developers and businesses that have invested in Netlify. What's most important is to make that impact in a true scalable manner. When you speak to developers, you have to understand what they care about."
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