WP Engine sets sights on bigger enterprise clients with first major funding round

Nineteen percent of the Web runs on WordPress, and tens of thousands of WordPress’s most active customers run on WP Engine.

WP Engine announced the close of $15 million in funding today to fuel the development of new products.

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WordPress is the largest self-hosted blogging platform in the world, running 74,317,512 sites. It offers both free and for-fee hosting options, but larger customers operating heavily trafficked blogs and publications require more attention and support when it comes to performance, reliability, data transfer and storage, scalability, and security. WordPress is open-source, which means that third-parties (like WP Engine) can swoop in to provide those added services.

WP Engine said that 36 million unique visitors interact with one of its clients every day, which is up significantly from the 20 million unique visitors WP Engine reported in October. It works with small businesses and large corporations alike — clients include New Relic, Gap, SoundCloud, Williams-Sonoma, and Foursquare.

Austin, Texas-based WP Engine recently promoted chief operating officer Heather Brunner to CEO. In an exclusive interview at the time, Brunner told VentureBeat that she viewed WordPress as a content-management system, rather that just a blogging platform, and her vision was bigger than hosting.

“We are experiencing hyper-growth, and it feels like we have reached a level of critical scale and performance as a business,” said Brunner in an interview with VentureBeat. “It is time to grow up a little bit as we keep on this journey. We are going to seize the market and opportunity as we move into the higher end of SMB and the enterprise.”

This effort includes building more sophisticated analytics capabilities as well as new developer tools.

All of WP Engine’s customers are paying customers, and the company has not raised money since its $1.2 million round back in 2011. North Bridge Growth Equity led this round.