Christian Bach

Netlify is a San Francisco-based cloud computing company that offers hosting and serverless backend services for static websites.

It features continuous deployment from Git across a global application delivery network, 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, Cisco, Atlassian, Vue.js, Citrix, Peloton, Kubernetes, Lodash, Smashing Magazine, and Sequoia Capital.

History

A predecessor to the company began in 2013 when Danish entrepreneur Mathias Biilmann noticed a return to static websites 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 in the 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 reincorporating and changing its name to 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.

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, a cloud-native web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and markup, was pioneered and created by Netlify. In basic terms, JAMstack is a significant shift in focus from the now abstractable backend to the now powerful frontend.

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."