Weebly provides easy-to-use tools for building websites, blogs, and online stores. The company says it has been used by 20 million people "in every country in the world." CEO David Rusenko framed Weebly as "the entrepreneurial springboard" to help people bring ideas to life and said the next phase is making Weebly more accessible. Rusenko said the company will continue to build an empowering technology platform to help people turn ideas or passions into scalable businesses. Financially, Weebly announced a $35 million Series C and a reported $455 million valuation according to the Wall Street Journal. Weebly is an AJAX website editor that creates personal pages using template skins and drag-and-drop content widgets. It launched a new blogging platform and a true WYSIWYG editor that lets users add dynamic content and edit or post directly on the page. The blog supports posting, commenting, categories, archiving, drafts, tags, and allows posts to contain any Weebly widgets. Weebly added new widgets such as a Twitter badge and supports embedding arbitrary widgets via an HTML widget. The company plans to roll out more wrappers for popular web widgets and eventually open the platform to the community, though it cannot use plugins from engines like WordPress because it’s built on its own platform. Weebly closed a $650K investment and said it will use the funds for new personal and product design. Weebly is an Ajax-based site creator that emphasizes ease of use and quick trials, requiring only a username and password to test. The company is opening an API for outside developers to extend its platform. VentureBeat noted Weebly integrates better with Google Maps than Google's own web site creator. The product initially had bugs but was re-evaluated in November and found improved. Competition in the site-creation space has driven pricing to zero, leaving the business model uncertain. The company has taken funding from Y Combinator; the article suggests hosting fees or keeping burn low and pursuing a flip as potential paths to sustainability.

Total raised

$36M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Apr 2014