Entries this day: meteor-funding-announcement

meteor funding announcement

##09:14 Thursday 26 July 2012

This may just be some nicely written copy, but I have a feeling that Meteor will be a game changer for the web.

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We're happy to announce that we've arranged $11.2 million in funding for Meteor's continued development. The money is now sitting in the bank account of Meteor Development Group, a company controlled by the project founders.

$11.2 million is a lot of money. What it gives us is certainty. No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years, without taking on consulting work or trying to create some other application on top of Meteor to sell. The high valuation of the round eliminates any possiblity of a talent acquisition. And we control the company's board. So, everyone in the community can be certain that Meteor will be around for the long haul.

Our agenda for the next few years is as follows:

1. Make Meteor the best platform for writing most any kind of

app. This is an enormous job and will continue to consume almost all of our energy. Our goal is ubiquity on the scale of SQL, Apache, or Java.

1. Create opportunities for Meteor developers -- for example,

encourage companies to adopt Meteor, creating jobs. We want to make you famous and get you paid.

1. Support the Meteor community. This includes everything from

publishing books and organizing conferences, to being responsive to bug reports and pull requests, to finally making some cool tshirts.

Meteor will always be free and open-source. Eventually, we plan to make a commercial product too, called Galaxy. Galaxy will be a product that the operations department at a large company might buy. It'll be an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for Meteor apps. In other words, it'll let you run a private, centrally controlled "meteor deploy"-like service for your company, on your own hardware. You'll be able to manage how your apps are distributed across your datacenters, perform capacity planning, and enforce controls and policies that are appropriate to your organization. Google and Facebook have these tools -- why shouldn't your organization? If your company is not large enough to have an operations department, it's unlikely that you'd want to buy Galaxy.

Galaxy is a long distance in the future. For now, the only focus is Meteor.

With this money comes a lot of responsibility. When we started this project, we took on two jobs -- building a great application platform, and building a fun, welcoming, and supportive community around it. Now we're taking on a third job, building a world-class company. This is not an easy job, and we already have our hands full with jobs one and two. Fortunately we've recruited some excellent help.

• Top VC fund Andreessen Horowitz is putting up most of the money. We

chose AH because everyone we met at AH was staggeringly intelligent, and many of them have built highly impactful companies such as Netscape. AH also has strong name recognition among CTO's and CIO's, which will make it easier to sell your boss on Meteor.

• Meteor's partner at AH is Peter Levine. As former CEO of XenSource,

he is an expert at selling open source into the enterprise. AH has kindly allowed their board seat to be occupied by Rod Johnson, who created the open source Spring framework and built a successful company (SpringSource) around it. And we also found a way to involve David Skok at Matrix Ventures, who built the enterprise sales strategy for JBoss, the open-source application server. Peter, Rod, and David are our dream team and we're very fortunate to have gotten them all into the same room.

• The wise and patient counsel of James Lindenbaum (Heroku) has

already been invaluable. Besides James, other individual investors include Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook/Asana), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul Buchheit (Gmail), Maynard Webb, Ron Conway, and others.

• Meteor was also a stealth participant in the S11 cycle of Y Combinator.

Deals like these have a lot of moving parts and take a long time to close. It's a relief to make this announcement and get back to coding. We'll have more news over the coming weeks.

-- Geoff Schmidt, MDG CEO ==============================================