Netlify


Netlify is a San Francisco-based cloud computing company that offers hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static websites.
Its features include continuous deployment from Git across Netlify Edge, the company's global application delivery network infrastructure, serverless form handling, support for AWS Lambda functions, and full integration with Let's Encrypt. It provides both free and paid plans.
Netlify customers include Google, Facebook, Verizon, NBC, Samsung, Nike, Cisco, Atlassian, LiveChat, Unilever, TriNet, Loblaw, Wieden+Kennedy, HashiCorp, Vue.js, Citrix, Peloton, Kubernetes, Lodash, Smashing Magazine, and Sequoia Capital.

History

A predecessor to the company was founded in 2013 when Danish entrepreneur Mathias Biilmann noticed the emergence of Git-centered workflows with modern build tools and static sites generators, a shift he described as "a massive change happening in the web development space", while running MakerLoop, a content management startup based in San Francisco. In 2015, Biilmann invited Christian Bach, his childhood friend who was working as an executive at a creative services agency in Denmark, to join him as co-founder in his new venture. Netlify was publicly launched as a MakerLoop product in March 2015.
On December 19, 2017, MakerLoop filed a certificate of amendment with the Secretary of State of Delaware rebranding the entire company as Netlify.

Financing

On August 16, 2016, Netlify raised $2.1 million from the founders of GitHub, Heroku, and Rackspace Cloud.
On August 9, 2017, the company announced that it had raised $12 million in series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
On October 9, 2018, the company issued a press release announcing that it had completed a series B round led by Kleiner Perkins—with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Slack and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, among others—securing $30 million.
On March 4, 2020, Netlify secured $53 million in a series C round led by EQT Ventures, the venture capital branch of Swedish investment company EQT, with contributions by existing investors Adreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and newcomer Preston-Werner Ventures.

Products

Netlify CMS

To address some of the limitations of static websites, which tend to be less sophisticated and harder to use for the website maintainer than a dynamic content publishing solution such as WordPress or Medium, Netlify develops its own open source headless content management system called Netlify CMS.

Jamstack

Jamstack is a cloud-native web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript code, reusable APIs, and markup content. It was pioneered and created by Netlify. In its purest form, the idea of Jamstack is that a web application is pre-built into static pages, using content and code to generate the output. In basic terms, Jamstack is a significant shift in focus from the now abstractable back end to the now-powerful front end.
Jamstack can create better performance, higher security, easier scaling and better developer experiences.

Reception

In March 2017, Netlify CMS was named "GitHub project of the week" by the Software Development Times.
On July 10, 2018, GitHub founder and former CEO Tom Preston-Werner predicted that "within 5 years, you'll build your next large scale, fully featured web app with JAMstack and deploy on Netlify."
In an October 2018 press release co-authored by Netlify, CodePen co-founder Chris Coyier stated that "this is where the web is going, Netlify is just bringing it to us all a lot faster. With all the innovation in the space, this is an exciting time to be a developer."

Citations