Wix Raises $10M from Benchmark

Wix, a New York and Tel Aviv-based startup that simplifies the building of flash websites and widgets, just raised $10 million in Series C venture funding led by Benchmark, with existing investors Bessemer and Mangrove participating in the round. Wix’s value proposition, if you will, is that it lets non-tech savvy people create slick, well-designed Flash-based websites without compromising SEO (Flash content is not indexed by search engines). Users produce content with a Flash-based drag-and-drop tool that outputs content that is a hybrid between Flash and HTML (thus allowing search engine indexing). Wix already has 3.5 million free users, with 400,000 joining per month. Undoubtedly, Wix will use the expansion capital to accelerate user growth and perhaps to more firmly cement their competitive positioning against Weebly and Sprout.

Interestingly, this funding comes shortly before HTML5 is expected to reach W3C recommendation (later this year). While HTML5 may eventually push CPU-hogging Flash into obsolescence (still up for debate), it will likely be a while before that happens. Wix’s investors are betting it never will.