Webydo Bags $7M To Turn More Designs Into Hosted Websites

Webydo, a software as a service startup that gives web designers the tools to circumvent a more traditional website creation process by excising the need for them to do any manual coding by automatically converting their design into a hosted HTML5 website, has closed a $7 million Series B funding round.

The round was led by equity-based crowdfunding VC platform OurCrowd, along with Magna Capital Partners and a group of unnamed strategic investors from the US and UK. The new round brings Webydo’s total funding to $9.7 million. The business was founded back in 2010.

We first covered Webydo in April 2013, when it was showing off its wares in Startup Alley at Disrupt NY and opening up its closed beta to the US market. It now has almost 93,000 active designers using its platform, and says it’s adding “thousands” more every week. While more than 335,000 websites have been created with its tools to date (up from 50,000+ back in April 2013). It pegs its user growth rate in Q1 this year at 100%.

Webydo competes to a degree with Adobe web design tools like Dreamweaver but it’s differentiating by offering both the tools and the management and hosting of the resulting websites in one service offering — so it’s targeting designers and agencies wanting a simplified all-in-one route to get websites up and running.

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Webydo has a freemium model and a community focus. Its drag and drop website creation tools are free to use but the designer pays a hosting fee once they hit publish to turn their web design into an active website. Pricing starts at $9 per month for one website and 3GB of storage, rising to $85 per month for 250 websites and unlimited storage.

The community element involves Webydo polling its designer users on the next features it should develop. Recent community requests have led to the beta launch of a Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator, for instance — as seen in action on this website created with its tools.

CEO Shmulik Grizim says Webydo plans to use the new funding to continue expanding the feature-set of its software, and also to develop additional tools to tap its community.

“We’re a community-led cloud platform and our mission is to provide our designers the best professional work environment for website creation. Therefore, we’ve doubled our team of engineers and designers,” he told TechCrunch.

“We now have a team of 35 creative thinkers working on developing all the features requested by our community, including the next stages of development of the Code-free Parallax Scrolling Animator and [another community requested feature] the Pixel-Perfect Responsive Editor that are currently in Beta.”