WordPress hosting specialist WP Engine scores $23M

Correction: An earlier version of this article credited WP Engine with $20 million in funding. The actual amount is $23 million.

WP Engine, a startup that hosts websites based on the open-source WordPress content-management system, said today that it’s taken on $23 million in new funding.

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The news follows word of several other hosting companies getting funded lately, including Acquia, DigitalOcean, Pantheon, Squarespace, Weebly, and Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.

Even so, WP Engine, with its focus on having WordPress experts handle website operations, could make good sense for plenty of companies, even as others grow, too.

“It’s an exciting time for all of us, and I predict a lot of interesting and new technologies [will] come into the space,” WP Engine chief executive Heather Brunner told VentureBeat in an email.

The startup claims to have more than 29,000 customers now, including Allstate, AMD, Asana, Foursquare, GeekWire, Harvard University, New York University — and VentureBeat.

Around 250 people work for WP Engine, with the startup on track to increase the headcount to 350 by the end of the year, Brunner wrote.

WP Engine in recent months has added disaster recovery, as well as the ability to serve up different content to different site visitors based on their location. Better analytics for content makers could be coming next.

“We are … exploring creating technologies to gain richer insights to site owners to help them make better business decisions,” Brunner wrote.

WP Engine started in 2010 and is based in Austin, Texas.

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North Bridge Growth Equity led the new round in WP Engine. To date the startup has raised $41.2 million.