Engine Yard takes $15mill Series B Round from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark

Posted by ezmobius Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Man it seems like yesterday that Engine Yard was a small 3 person startup with big ideas and little cash. People seemed to like what we were offering and the business grew into a thriving startup.

In the beginning we only had plans to be the best fully managed rails/ruby hosting company. And I think we met this goal early on. But it became apparent that we had a strong brand and we started kicking around ideas of becoming an open source software company as well.

We believe in Ruby as a platform, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is when we sponsored Rubinius and Merb, hiring many developers to work on both projects.

Engine Yard has become much more then just a managed rails hosting company, we want to strengthen the Ruby ecosystem for everyone by providing the infrastructure and open source software for the next wave of Ruby deployments in the cloud.

We’ve also been delving into the cloud computing arena as I think the next 5 years are going to see huge transition from standard hosting models into the cloud. Our upcoming Vertebra project is a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP. You can expect to see the first open source release of Vertebra this summer, I think this is a truly unique and very fun project to work on. I think a lot of folks out there will have tons of different use cases for it.

So fast forward to right now, Engine Yard now has more then 80 employees worldwide. Half of these people are Application Support and SysAdmins working to support all the awesome applications we host. Providing 24/7 support. But we also have a growing Engineering team working on all kinds of exciting stuff. I consider myself lucky to work with such a talented team.

So with all that being said, I’m excited to annouce that we have just closed our Series B round of VC funding totalling $15million dollars(insert austin powers joke here)! This round includes investment from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark.

We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.

Watch this space, we have lots of exciting announcements in the coming months. I’d like to thank all of our customers and users of our open source software and the Ruby community in general. It has been a wild ride these last 2 years and I expect many more exciting things to come!

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  1. nap said 25 minutes later:
    congrats ez! not only is this great news for ey but also for the ruby community in general. can't wait to see what the future brings.
  2. Geoffrey Grosenbach said 30 minutes later:
    Unbelievable! It's great to hear that Ruby has such strong advocates and will be going strong for years to come.
  3. Steve Odom said about 1 hour later:
    Awesome, Ezra. You guys are doing great things for the community.
  4. asa said about 1 hour later:
    wow. great news for great folks.
  5. Thiago Freire said about 1 hour later:
    Very good news! I'm pretty sure that things like these will become more common in Ruby community. And I'm anxious to see how Vertebra will look like!
  6. <a href="http://minddeco.de" rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow">jf</a> said about 1 hour later:
    opensource and ruby... sounds great!!! :) See you on the ride - I look forward to what's going to happen... :)
  7. Steven Bristol said about 2 hours later:
    Congratulations Ezra! This is awesome. Well done. :)
  8. TonyC said about 2 hours later:
    holy crap! awesome news.
  9. Joao said about 2 hours later:
    Here's my word of support: keep on fighting the good fight! Thanks a lot from a believer in Ruby!
  10. Bill Katz said about 2 hours later:
    Congrats, Ezra! Nice to see Amazon's venture commitment to your work.
  11. Brian Hogan said about 2 hours later:
    That is awesome news indeed I can't wait to see what comes out of this.
  12. Hemant said about 2 hours later:
    Congratulations Ezra (and EY too!).
  13. Andy C said about 2 hours later:
    The story of EngineYard is truly one of the nicest I've ever come across, and I think many of us share and care about the same vision of the future as you, Ez. Congratulations on the funding!
  14. Erik Dungan said about 2 hours later:
    Great news. I just signed up with EY a couple weeks ago and we're moving one of our apps over there now. Exciting to see what else you have in store.
  15. Lance Ennen said about 3 hours later:
    Awesome great news! Congrats to everyone at EngineYard! I look forward to working with Vertebra. Thank for all the hard work.
  16. Michael Sheakoski said about 3 hours later:
    Congrats to everyone at Engine Yard! You guys are truly a class act.
  17. Zack said about 3 hours later:
    Wow - great news! Congrats Ezra and EY team. I'm looking forward to playing with Vertebra...
  18. Kristin White said about 4 hours later:
    That is SUCH exciting news! Check out this video interview with Tom Mornini and Lance Walley, CTO & CEO of Engine Yard..they talk about how you can literally go drinking on the night you launch your Rails app with EY: http://talktech.tv/2008/06/12/interview-with-engine-yard/
  19. Bil Kleb said about 4 hours later:
    Excellent news.
  20. Luca Bozzo said about 6 hours later:
    Congrats to you all
  21. Ric said about 7 hours later:
    RoR has it's vehement critics, so I'm glad that people like Engine Yard are here to balance things out. I'm a co-founder of a startup using Rails for our Software-as-a-Service product, and although we don't use Engine Yard for hosting, we like what they do for the community - Congrats on your success.
  22. brian mcnamara said about 11 hours later:
    awesome news. really awesome. keep on keepin' on.
  23. Antonio Cangiano said about 11 hours later:
    This is great news, congratulations Ezra! It's a big win, not just for EY, but for the Ruby community.
  24. Notebook said about 11 hours later:
    Congrats ez, it's made my day, good news, thank you all :)
  25. Gaveen said about 12 hours later:
    Great to hear the news. It was good to see an enthusiastic team behind the Ruby platform. To be honest, I think EY has been another factor in the success Ruby has seen in the enterprise. Then venturing into FOSS development and taking Rubinius, etc. under the care was another brave, yet a smart move, IMHO. Good luck Ezra (and the EY team). We'll look forward to Vertebra and much more. :)
  26. Wilson Bilkovich said about 14 hours later:
    Sweet. Time for a Rubinius jet!
  27. David Parker said about 15 hours later:
    Congrats Ezra! The Ruby community continues to grow and I'm glad to see Engine Yard out front!
  28. Dirceu Jr. said about 16 hours later:
    Awesome! Congrats EY team. I like the focus on Ruby and when Ezra says "next wave of Ruby"... great point of view does not get stuck in Rails things ;)
  29. whoismario said about 21 hours later:
    Congratulations, Ezra. You guys have so many great products and I'm glad you're being rewarded for it.
  30. George Moschovitis said 3 days later:
    Congratulations!
  31. Scott said 3 days later:
    great to hear it. we've started to [use merb and it is great!

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