Speed, confidence and simplicity: our $34m raise and you

It’s hard to believe that four years ago, Platform.sh was just 14 people working in a small office in Paris. Looking back since the initial launch, it is quite unbelievable to see how much the team has accomplished. We came into an incredibly busy field, dominated by global software vendors and infrastructure companies with endlessly deep pockets, but we came with two main assets in our game: an application developer’s mindset rather than an infrastructure one and some radical ideas about what it means to develop software in a continuous deployment world.

Our growth in this phase has been both full of learnings, and impressive. In four years, we have built a unique, scalable, global cloud platform running on several mainstream public clouds, and being used by over 650 enterprise customers – almost evenly split between the US and Europe, and thousands of self-serve developers using the product every day. We’re now ready to take the next step on this global journey and push Platform.sh to the next level.

So it is with this in mind that we’re delighted to announce that we have raised US $34 million in a Series C funding round. The round was led by U.S.-based Partech, along with Idinvest Partners, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), SNCF Digital Ventures and returning investor, Hi Inov. We are very proud to start this new phase of the company with such great partners.

Our new investors share our vision of simplifying cloud infrastructure for Development teams. In today’s highly competitive digital world, we believe Development teams should spend as much time as possible making sure their users enjoy an outstanding product experience and focus on building really meaningful features, yet the services provided by most cloud providers are incredibly complex to work with. In fact, the level of complexity reached by public cloud infrastructure in the past few years is hard to believe: The AWS homepage alone allows you to navigate between 131 products. The IBM Cloud Computing category includes 162, just a sample of over 2000 in their catalogue.

For anyone managing a development project, the complexity is enormous. You need to create a deployment workflow, set up a back-up strategy, implement a security and compliance strategy, set-up monitoring and on-call for your engineering team, optimize costs through an incredibly complex billing mechanism, and much, much more. And the results are often brittle: a patchwork of services and open-source tools that continuously change and get deprecated forcing companies to continuously fight against the clock... or get stuck with legacy. Legacy that is only six months old but already represents huge technical debt. To build, maintain and run applications on public cloud infrastructures you have to hire an increasing number of highly trained engineers to take on so many responsibilities, at considerable cost. The nuts and bolts, trivial and anecdotal details become the focus points of your most senior engineers: Cloud was supposed to increase productivity!

We introduce a radically different model. We give you a unified vision of the application and the development workflow, where testing, production and scaling comes together in a single platform, and a single contract. A truly minimal contract that covers the application, its infrastructure and its full life-cycle. Platform.sh provides an out-of the box experience that enables development teams to focus on building and improving their applications, deploying new features safely and at a rapid pace, while not having to worry about managing the infrastructure. It is our mission to manage and automate the infrastructure, but we don’t dumb it down. The application creators are free to build the architectures they need.  Developers and product teams stay in the driver’s seat.

As a company, we are now in the best situation we have ever been and more than ever we strive to deliver on our key value: “We are nothing without our customer success”. We will invest this money to continuously innovate and improve the developer experience and the scalability of the platform. At Platform.sh, we want to empower new ideas, to provide you the ability to do incremental improvement everyday, to embrace growth hacking, AB testing, ship new code as soon as it is ready. We want you to be able to “Deploy on Fridays”™ without the fear of breaking things. We want to provide you with an unfair competitive advantage so you can move fast and succeed without borders.

This raise is going to empower us to accelerate our roadmap and soon enough you are going to hear about some very disruptive features. But that is probably a story for another day. Today is also a moment for a couple of thanks.

With this fundraise, above all else, we want to deeply thank our customers and the several hundreds of digital agencies for the invaluable trust they have given us. Some of you chose to bet on our technology early on, to bet on us while the company was no more than a budding flower. I would like to particularly thank Mark Lavelle and his team at Magento for trusting us while launching Magento Cloud, Philippe Laplane from Orange Cloud for Business for choosing Platform.sh to strengthen their cloud offering, Michel Lechenault from Seloger, Scott Hooker from TES, Peter Ward from Reiss, Guillaume Pech-Gourg from Hachette, Florian Lorettan from Wunderkraut, Nick Morgalla from the British Council, Winn Jewett from Oxbow Labs, Fabien Potencier from Symfony… And so many others for trusting us very early on with their business. It is also your courage that got us to this exciting new phase.

This milestone was achieved through the trust of our clients and our partners. But that trust was won through the dedication of a team. Hey team, I want to thank you. I am humbled by what you have achieved. This was no small feat. You handled the Support calls while onboarding new colleagues. You wrote some incredible pieces of clean, efficient code while doing Ops. You treated clients with patience, empathy and honesty while those experienced the rough edges of a young and fast evolving product. You showed grit and solidarity when the going got rough. And you did all of this while building a culture that is not only inclusive but that is fundamentally nice. You are so nice to work with.

Thank you very deeply for your trust.

Fred Plais, CEO Platform.sh