Netlify, an all-in-one platform that helps developers build and deploy websites without worrying about hosting and infrastructure, has raised $30 million in a series B round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Slack and Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, Figma CEO and cofounder Dylan Field, and Yelp CEO and cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman.

Founded in 2015, San Francisco-based Netlify wants to “modernize the web” through a platform that connects with developers’ git code repository system of choice, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Atlassian’s Bitbucket. Developers then add their build settings, and Netlify takes charge of deploying the website across a global application delivery network (ADN).

The problem

Getting from code to a high-performance website can be an arduous process. First you have to write the code, then there is the process of joining a web host and uploading pages to the host, and then you have to start messing around with IP addresses and domain names. Writing code is only part of the software engineering picture, which is where Netlify comes into play.

Netlify essentially does all the post-code spadework in one fell swoop, with applications and content created on a network that circumvents the need to mess around with servers. It’s all about getting from code to a live website as quickly as possible.

Funding code

We’ve seen a lot of investment in DevOps town these past few months, with the likes of JFrog recently raising $165 million, GitLab raising $100 million, and Microsoft in the process of acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion.

Netlify is tackling things from a different perspective, but the common goal is all about making engineers’ jobs easier.

“Netlify is tackling an ambitious goal,” said Kleiner Perkins general partner Mamoon Hamid. “In a sense, they are completely rethinking how the modern web works. The response to what they are doing has been overwhelming, and early traction really shows they have struck a chord with the developer community and organizations seeking to build high-performing and secure websites at a low cost.”

Netlify had previously raised $14 million, including $12 million in a series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz last year. With another $30 million in the bank, the company is well-financed to continue on its mission to “replace web servers” with a global application delivery network. Indeed, Netlify founder and CEO Mathias Biilmann thinks all websites will be underpinned by ADNs in the coming years.

“The cloud made it faster, easier, and cheaper to provision servers, VMS, and containers,” Biilmann said. “But more devices always bring more complications. Customers have come to us with AWS environments that have dozens or even hundreds of them for a single application. Our goal is to remove the requirement for those servers completely. We’re not trying to make managing infrastructure easy. We want to make it totally unnecessary.”
