Engine Yard, a provider of support for the hot programming language and application framework, Ruby on Rails, has raised $3.5 million in a first round of capital from Benchmark Capital.
Ruby on Rails (or Rails, for short) has grown tremendously popular over the past two years, thanks to its light and agile nature. Leading companies of the latest Internet boom, including Twitter, have developed their applications using the framework. It is open source and therefore flexible — and is conducive to speedy development.
However, many of the fast-growing Rails-based companies have experienced choppy site performance. Twitter, for example, is notorious for its down-time. Some have criticized Ruby on Rails as being the problem, but the experts say it isn’t Rails per se, but rather the lack of precaution and readiness to handle its vulnerabilities. In other words, support is key.
That’s where Engine Yard comes in. Engine Yard, together with group of competitors, support Rails companies by hosting their applications and giving them round-the-clock support, such a monitoring, application revision control, and a computer cluster architecture designed to maximize web server and database efficiency (see Engine Yard’s basic offerings here, or techie details here). The sector is nascent. Engine Yard launched in late 2006. Other competitors include Joyent, a slightly older player (which won Twitter’s business, beating out Engine Yard), Rails Machine and many others. Engine Yard’s customers include Idealab and Kongregate.
Benchmark approached Engine Yard after Benchmark kept getting pitched by entrepreneurs using Rails to build their web applications, said partner Mitch Lasky, who is joining the company’s board. “Rail kept coming up and up,” he said.
Benchmark partner Peter Fenton will join him on the board.
Engine Yard hired Evan Phoenix, the leading developer of the Rubinius project, and has brought on four other key Rubinius contributors to work under him.
Engine Yard’s Walley said he took Benchmark’s money because the firm is considered the best in the open source arena. Engine Yard represents the firm’s eighth open source investment. Its companies include Zimbra, Red Hat, MySQL, Collabnet, SpringSource, Hyperic and Terracotta. Peter Fenton, now a partner at Benchmark, invested in JBoss and XenSource while was at Accel.
The company started in Sacramento, but has just moved to San Francisco’s South of Market area (SOMA) where many of the Rails companies are based (Engine Yard is ten doors down from Twitter now; watch out Joyent!)
The company is already profitable. It has a $3 million in annual revenue run rate, but that’s growing quickly, Walley said.
2 Comments
-
stuff collector said:
This is a good news for all those Rails lovers and startups who work with Engine Yard folks. and this a great move towards making Rails a better enterprise candidate . Go Rails!.. I have covered the story in my post also. here is the link http://www.messagedance.com/me…..630118a41a
-
Michael Slater said:
Since Rails has grown very nicely, largely without any major financial backing, it will be interesting to see what happens with this infusion of capital.
Like most VC investments, I suspect this one is about the people, as much as anything else. There’s simply some great folks at Engine Yard, and Rails is a vibrant area that will offer all sorts of opportunities as its use continues to expand.
For those of you who are still trying to figure out just what Rails is, check out our podcast at http://www.LearningRails.com.
5 Trackbacks
3:36 pm
Engine Yard, a Rails application support company, gets backing from Benchmark | My Life As said:
[...] Click here for the source [...]
9:08 am
What Benchmark’s investment in Ruby on Rails support should tell us « Mystitech’s Weblog said:
[...] fuel the need for its services. Hence, the company plans to use Benchmark’s capital infusion to help improve the stability of Rails for all…not just Engine Yard’s customers: (A) capital infusion could help Engine Yard work on [...]
10:58 am
Rails developers showing love for Heroku » VentureBeat said:
[...] as Rails hosting service Engine Yard, which announced a $3.5 million round of funding in January (our coverage). But Lindenbaum and Engine Yard chief executive Lance Walley both say there’s room for [...]
9:05 pm
New Relic gets $3.5M to help manage Ruby on Rails applications » VentureBeat said:
[...] applications. Of course, there’s already a lot of action in this market. In fact, Benchmark invested in another Rails company, Engine Yard, back in January. But Fenton and Cirne both say that Engine Yard and New Relic are [...]
3:13 pm
Twitter to jump off Ruby on Rails? » VentureBeat said:
[...] development has been building. In the last few months, Benchmark Capital announced investments in Engine Yard and New Relic, two companies related to Rails application deployment and management, while a [...]