Open source web server developer NGINX today announced that it has secured $3 million in a Series A round of financing coming from BV Capital, Runa Capital and an entity affiliated with the private investment firm of Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell.
As a result of its ability to help companies squeeze more performance out of each server, the company said its web server currently powers over 20% of the top 1,000 biggest websites, including Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial, Hulu, Dropbox and WordPress.
The company will put the cash infusion to work to support its commercial arm, Nginx, Inc., which was started in July 2011, along with its expansion into the U.S. with a new San Francisco headquarters in Q4 2011.
“By ensuring on-demand, high performance infrastructure product matching the needs of modern online businesses, NGINX has established itself as the second most popular open source Web server in the world and the only one with a growing market share,” said Dmitry Chikhachev of Runa Capital. “It all makes the company a very attractive investment, particularly as NGINX prepares to build on its success with the launch of new commercial solutions.”
“Several of the companies we invested in were able to solve significant scaling issues by switching their web platforms to NGINX,” said Thomas Gieselmann of BV Capital. “NGINX transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today.”
The company says that it has already signed its first commercial customers and is currently creating business and technology partnerships in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
“For service providers, there is another choice in the market for workloads that are becoming increasingly demanding,” said Agatha Poon of analyst firm Tier1 Research.
The company plans to offer a commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform, around mid-2012 which will enable advanced performance, traffic management, extended configuration and security features for hosting, cloud and enterprise server infrastructure. NGINX will also offer flexible options to upgrade existing web installations to modern and efficient high density web software.
“My advice to anyone running a Web site today who is hitting performance constraints is to investigate whether they can use NGINX,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, which built its Web performance and security platform using NGINX as a foundation. “Our experience shows that switching to NGINX enables full utilization of the modern operating system and existing hardware resources.”
“NGINX has received overwhelming support from the open source community,” said Igor Sysoev, the author of the software. “This investment allows us to take the performance and efficiency of NGINX to yet another level, strengthening its core advantages with long-awaited functionality.”