Engine Yard's Rails app support gets another $19M

Engine Yard, a company that helps developers deploy and manage web applications built with the Ruby on Rails programming framework (which is popular for fast web development), has raised $19 million in a third venture round.

This brings the San Francisco company’s total funding to $37.5 million. As a point of comparison, to about 10 times the money raised by competitor Heroku. Both companies offer services to take the pain out of launching a Rails app after you’ve built it, in Engine Yard’s case hosted on its own private infrastructure or, more recently, on a service called Engine Yard Cloud that uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Both companies have described the difference as a focus on service (Engine Yard) versus a focus on automation (Heroku), though the Engine Yard Cloud moves further in the direction of automation.

Engine Yard says it has more than 600 customers. In June, it also added support for JRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language that integrates with Java.

The new funding comes from DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates.

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