July 18, 2022 | By Eric Buatois, General Partner, BGV
In 2022, the average organization maintains an astonishing 269 customer-facing websites.
That’s a lot of code to maintain… much less, manage.
Which is why the platform as a service (PaaS) market is exploding.
As cloud usage increases, PaaS gives teams the tools to manage databases, queues, and workflows. PaaS also allows to fully test ideas and merge the result seamlessly onto multiple cloud providers.
BGV believes in the promise of PaaS, and we recently made a big investment in the market. Along with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, and Revaia, BGV participated in the closing of a $140 million Series D round investment in Platform.sh, a software tool that enables enterprises to build, launch, scale, and securely manage their fleet of web sites and applications using various languages and frameworks.
Let’s take a closer look at Platform.sh, its solution, and its growth potential.
Web App Veterans
Platform.sh boasts a very strong management team with deep experience in web apps and marketing agencies. Co-founder Fred Plais previously launched Infoclic, a French-language search engine, and Commerce Guys, an e-commerce platform. Ori Pekelman, another co-founder, previously ran two consulting companies, Internet Patrol and Constellation Matrix. The third co-founder, Damien Tournoud, helped to start Commerce Guys and acted as an IT strategy consultant. Other members of the management team include Fabien Potencier, founder and CEO of Symphony; Beatrice Harrois, CMO, previously with leading European cloud provider OVHcloud ; Jessica Orozo, formerly of Rackspace; and Doug Goldberg, an e-commerce veteran.
The company operates as a fully distributed team, taking advantage of global talents, cross-border collaboration, and remote work flow. Platform.sh also includes five women on its executive management team, showing an impressive commitment to diversity.
Deploy in Minutes, Not Hours
Platform.sh’s solution enables web developers to send their code to production in less than 20 minutes, accomplishing what previously required hours of work.
The PaaS Platform.sh solution improves developer productivity by removing repetitive tasks such as updating security patches, updating latest software releases, configuring infrastructure, and with integrated app performance monitoring tools that enables to easily identify where, when and how performance is impacted so recommendation for changes are made rapidly.
Those capabilities are especially prized by C-suite executives, who will appreciate the resources and investments saved over their fleet of websites.
A Push-Pull Business Model
The company’s dual business models complement and leverage each other for advantage. The first is a developer-first, bottom-up approach aimed at the devops team. The second is a direct sales model for large accounts. Combined, the two models accomplish a push-pull marketing strategy with enterprise companies and marketing agencies feeding off each other.
Platform.sh’s current OEM customers include Adobe, Shopware, OVHcloud.
Cost Reduction and Flexibility
The company’s competitive advantage is easy to explain. Rather than managing dozens or hundreds of websites in silos, Platform.sh is enabling large corporations to manage their entire fleet of websites on a single platform. That kind of streamlining allows for cost reduction while increasing developer flexibility. Huge multinational corporations like Adobe or Nestle, but also smaller digital teams like Gault et Millau, Unicef, University of Missouri trust and endorse the company’s product.
Platform.sh is also committed to reducing its customers’ carbon footprint. They accomplish that goal by focusing on cloud density and by creating automated efficiencies that allow the same, unmodified workload to consume the least amount of resources possible, while keeping the same performance characteristics.
They also aim to provide development teams with the tools that allow them to actually make better-optimized software, so it runs more efficiently and requires less resources. And finally, they guide their customers towards the best data centers and geographies. This means measuring carbon emissions with a robust model, and providing great detail per application both in production and in development. They want our customers to make informed decisions.
A Path to $100 Million in Revenue
The Series D funding will allow the company to develop its direct sales team, hone its marketing message, and search for suitable acquisition targets. In turn, the company plans to extend its footprint on the way to $100 million in revenues.
BGV is proud to be an early investor in Fred Plais and his Platform.sh team, and we’re excited to participate in the company’s next stage of growth.
