Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
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Drupal-based site management startup Pantheon now serves more than 1 billion web hits a month, an impressive milestone for a service that launched fully nine months ago.

As we’ve noted before, Pantheon wants to help companies get rid of their in-house content management systems and use Drupal instead. Pantheon bills itself as “Drupal-as-a-service” because it runs in the cloud and makes site management easier than if you had to run software on your own servers. Customers that use Pantheon include Chicago’s WBEZ (pictured), AAA, Alley Interactive, Stanford University Libraries, Kalamuna, USC Marshall School, and Big Switch Networks.

“We created Pantheon to liberate developers and companies from having to buy, run, and manage servers in order to bring their ideas to the web,” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen said in a statement. “It’s been rewarding to see the number and diversity of companies that share that vision and are now using Pantheon, helping us reach this important milestone just a few months after our launch.”

On top of reaching the 1-billion-hits milestone, Pantheon has launched a new “Apollo Dashboard” to help its customers manage sites through a browser. Through the dashboard, developers can “deploy sites, create staging and testing environments, and manage code deployments” from one interface.

Pantheon offers a basic free plan for its service, with paid plans starting at $25 per month.

San Francisco-based Pantheon was founded in 2010 and has raised $6.3 million to date from investors including Foundry Group, Baseline, First Round, and Founders Collective.

Drupal-based content management startup Pantheon has raised a $5 million first round of funding from Foundry Group and a few others to help move enterprise website management to the cloud, the company announced today.

As we’ve written before, Pantheon wants to help companies get rid of their in-house content management systems and use Drupal instead. Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat that Drupal is more powerful than WordPress and more useful for enterprise-grade websites.

What makes this offering different from the open-source Drupal client is that Pantheon runs as a software-as-a-service instead of running on your own servers. Pantheon’s “Drupal-as-a-service” is built on top of Rackspace’s cloud, but Rosen said his service is “infrastructure agnostic.”

“The majority of the market doesn’t have a real CMS yet,” Rosen said. “These companies should adopt a web-based CMS that is delivered as a ‘software-as-a-service.’ Companies don’t want to deal with servers these days.”

The new $5 million round was led by Foundry Group, with participation by prior investors Baseline, First Round, and Founders Collective. This brings the total amount Pantheon has raised to $6.3 million.

San Francisco-based Pantheon was founded in 2010 and now has 13 employees. Rosen said the company has “hundreds of customers,” including NBC Universal, University of California-Berkeley, and AAA.

Watch Pantheon’s latest video below for more: