Nitrous.IO raises $6.65M, claims your sluggish development team should work in the cloud

Nitrous.IO says efficient developers should work in the cloud. Lead investor Bessemer Venture Partners agrees — to the tune of $6.65 million.

Formerly called Action.io, Nitrous.IO offers development teams a series of tools, including cloud-based coding environments and a Web-based code editor (IDE).

Nitrous.IO claims its customers, including startups like app hosting service Heroku and popular dev shop Hashrocket, have saved “500,000 hours of development time.” That audacious statement is controversial; there is no proof that Web-based code editors are any more efficient than desktop or command line tools. Furthermore, much of this is a matter of preference — different developers prefer different tools.

Despite its over-confidence, or perhaps because of it, Nitrous.IO is growing alarmingly fast. The company currently serves 100,000 developers from 4,000 organizations after raising just $1 million in funding 11 months ago.