Pantheon Raises $21.5M Series B Round To Expand Its Web Hosting Platform

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by || 05/15/2014

Pantheonwp_front_promo, which currently offers a professional hosting solution for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it has raised a $21.5 million Series B funding round led by Rory O’Driscoll at Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Dev Ittycheria at OpenView Venture Partners. Existing investors Foundry Group and First Round Capital also participated in this round.

The company, which launched in early 2012, started out as a Drupal hosting solution, but recently expanded into the fast-growing WordPress hosting market as well. The company currently runs about 65,000 sites on its platform, up from 55,000 last September.

Pantheon CEO Zachary Rosen told me that the company plans to use this new funding to continue to improve its hosting platform. In addition, he plans to expand the team quickly over the coming months (especially the support team) and to continue to invest in partnerships. For the time being, however, the company will continue to build products that are squarely aimed at developers who build sites professionally.

While Pantheon offers a $25/month personal plan, that’s not its main market, and this plan is more about giving developers a way to test the service than it is for individuals to host their WordPress or Drupal sites.

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Pantheon’s hosting technology is very different from regular web hosts and uses containers instead of the virtual machines most hosts currently use. This, combined with the rest of its infrastructure, allows the company to provide extremely high availability and to easily absorb any traffic spikes to a single site.

This kind of infrastructure play must have been interesting to the company’s new investor’s too. As Rosen told me, he was mostly looking for investors with repeated experience in taking a small, fast-growing company to a large exit and experience in the SaaS space. O’Driscoll did this with Omniture and ExactTarget and is an investor in the likes of Box, Chef, DataSift and Docusign. Ittycheria was the co-founder and CEO of BladeLogic, which was acquired by BMC in 2008 for around $900 million.