Platform.sh raises $34M in series C funding

Investment to Accelerate Growth and Customer Success in North America, Following Strong Adoption

Platform.sh, provider of the idea-to-cloud application platform that simplifies cloud infrastructures, today announced it has raised $34 million in a Series C funding round. U.S.-based Partech led the round, along with Idinvest Partners, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), SNCF Digital Ventures and returning investor, Hi Inov. Platform.sh will use the investment to accelerate its go-to-market strategy in North America and support its rapidly growing customer base in the region.

Platform.sh is a comprehensive “idea-to-cloud” application platform that simplifies cloud infrastructures, enabling enterprises to realize all the promises and benefits of the cloud without its ever-growing complexities. More than 650 enterprise customers across the globe currently use the Platform.sh product today to develop, test, deploy and run their cloud-based web applications with speed and confidence. The company, which has experienced 110 percent year-over-year revenue growth this year, addresses every major industry vertical and fuels the innovation of some of the world’s leading brands, including Magento, Gap Inc., The Financial Times, the British Council, and Hachette Book Group.

In order to meet escalating customer expectations, enterprises need their app deployments to be executed faster than ever before, but cloud infrastructures are inherently messy and require a level of expertise that is extremely wide and deep. As a result, implementing a continuous deployment strategy to ensure fast-evolving business needs are met, while also ensuring uptime, security and compliance, has become one of the most daunting challenges in software development. Platform.sh makes this simple.

Designed to support the most complex enterprise-scale production environments, Platform.sh combines an automated cloud with its unique rapid cloning technology that can instantly spin up and deploy exact clones of entire live web applications in less than 60 seconds, allowing development teams to ensure that new features do not break when in production. The unification of production, testing and development workflows results in 90 percent less DevOps efforts as compared to DIY solutions, and 40 percent improved productivity as compared to managed hosting providers at a significantly lower total cost.

“As cloud infrastructure providers have created more complexity, being able to deploy and run in the cloud requires more time, expertise and investment,” said Reza Malekzadeh, general partner at Partech and a former senior director at VMware. “Platform.sh has an incredibly powerful solution that helps enterprises realize the full and latest potential of cloud infrastructures – speed, performance, security and more – without the growing hurdles and constraints.”

Alban Wyniecki, investment director at Idinvest Partners, added: “The cloud application platform market is an incredibly fertile space, and given the impressive organic adoption of Platform.sh in the U.S., we're investing to capture more of that demand. The company’s strong traction and fast growth in North America, Europe and China signify that the company is well-positioned to become a market leader.”

The public cloud market has been growing at an unprecedented rate due to enterprises increasingly deploying more apps to the cloud. Per recent findings from research firm Gartner*, the Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) market, which includes the application platform as a service (aPaaS) segment to which Platform.sh belongs, is one of the fastest growing cloud markets. It is forecasted to be worth more than $15B in 2018 and will nearly double by 2021.

“Platform.sh has been great for us; the turnaround time for changes is very fast now, and we are able to update the site at any time of day, even on match days if we have to,” said John Dollin, senior operations manager at Arsenal Football Club. Richard Jones, CTO at Inviqa, a leading digital agency and consultancy, added: “After moving to Platform.sh, we delivered the new Arsenal FC website with significantly improved productivity. Our deployments are error-free and the site now runs faster and safer. When we need to, we are even able to deploy on Fridays!"

“The customer traction and organic growth we’ve seen over the past 12 months – especially in North America – made it clear that we are ready to scale on a global level,” said Frederic Plais, CEO of Platform.sh. “The productivity gains that our platform delivers are beyond anything offered by managed hosting solutions, or DIY approaches with cloud infrastructures. The recent years have seen an explosion of incredibly strong tools that help implement novel cloud architectures, but the mainline approach is patchwork and piecemeal. Platform.sh proposes a unified model that transcends categories, not only solving difficult cluster orchestration and continuous delivery problems, but also improving testing and quality assurance of applications.”

Platform.sh was cited recently by Gartner in its February 2018, The Key Trends in PaaS, 2018 report.