Weebly has been valued at $455 million in a new round of funding from
investors eager to cash in on a recent boom in website-creation
services.
The eight-year-old startup raised $35 million from Chinese Internet
giant Tencent and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Chief Executive
David Rusenko said in an interview.
Internet-publishing tools have been around since the early days of
the Web, when services like GeoCities and AngelFire offered free sites
with easy-to-use publishing tools. The newer generation of website
builders, including Weebly, Squarespace and Wix, use drag-and-drop tools
that require no coding chops and are geared toward the millions of
small businesses flocking to the Web to set up their first online
storefronts.
Weebly, founded by three Penn State students in 2006, now hosts more
than 20 million sites that are seen by 175 million visitors every month.
Many are entrepreneurs who pay Weebly monthly fees for extra features,
like e-commerce. They include Ceasar Chu, the inventor of a popular
ice-cube mold called the Whiskey Ball, who built his site on Weebly and has expanded the business through a distribution partnership with Amazon.com.
The company doesn’t disclose its revenue but is profitable and has been cash-flow positive since 2009, Rusenko said.
The new funds will help Weebly expand globally and compete with
several well-heeled rivals. Squarespace said last week it closed a $40 million growth round
from General Atlantic. Automattic, the creator of the popular WordPress
blogging platform, is seeking to raise up to $150 million in funding,
Fortune reported this month. Israeli company Wix held an initial public offering late last year.
“The Internet is changing the future of business and
entrepreneurship,” said David Wallerstein, chairman of Tencent USA, in
an emailed statement. “Weebly is driving this transition to a
mobile-driven e-commerce world with a platform that is just so simple
and intuitive to use,” he said.
Tencent is expanding its portfolio of fast-growing U.S. startups. The
Chinese company has backed mobile-messaging app Snapchat, e-commerce
site Fab and mobile game maker Plain Vanilla.
At nearly a half-billion dollars, Weebly is one of the most valuable
startups to emerge from the Y Combinator tech incubator, which Rusenko
and his co-founders attended in 2007. That was the same year as Dropbox,
the online-storage company now worth $10 billion.
