Announcing Ionic’s $8.5M Series A
Today, we are excited to announce that Ionic has raised an $8.5M Series A round, led by General Catalyst (investors in Stripe, Airbnb, and many others), along with our existing investors Lightbank, Arthur Ventures, and Founder Collective. This round brings our total funding raised to $12.2M.
We launched Ionic in November 2013 as a simple experiment: Could we build a compelling, web-based UI framework that allowed web developers to target mobile in a way that let them compete with the native developers of the world?
I think it’s safe to say that experiment has been a resounding success. Two million apps later, Ionic has been used to build featured app store apps used by millions, serious enterprise apps powering factories and financial institutions, and as the basis for a healthy ecosystem providing real opportunities to millions of developers around the world.
Two and a half years later, we’re still focused on the same mission we started with: adding mobile as a core competency of the open web stack. We believe that the world will be better off if our technology is based on open standards supported everywhere, especially on mobile. We believe web developers should be able to take HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the same technology they’ve been using for decades, and build amazing mobile apps alongside their great desktop web apps. The browser is not only an incredible feat of engineering, but one of the greatest feats of social consensus the world has ever seen, and we want to push it into the future.
In many ways, we feel like we’re just getting started with Ionic. I look up to projects like WordPress that changed desktop web development and design forever, empowering millions of people to take part in the rapidly growing web design economy, and I want Ionic to have that same impact on mobile. No one has really pulled that off yet, and the challenge and opportunity of doing that is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
To be sure, it’s not going to an easy feat, and as a project, we need to double down on making Ionic easier to use, more capable, more performant, and more flexible. This new round of funding helps us achieve those goals, and I’m excited that the team is already jumping into a higher gear, with several major Ionic releases in April alone!
So, what’s next? First, we are going to be releasing the stable version of Ionic 2 shortly, along with a few major improvements that push the limits of anything we did with Ionic 1. We are working on adding Progressive Web App support into all Ionic 1 and Ionic 2 apps, since we believe an Ionic app should run the same, whether it’s in the app store or in a mobile browser, enabling teams to benefit from both app store distribution and mobile web and search traffic, which is increasingly important. We will be rolling out the production-ready release of Ionic Platform, continuing to improve Ionic Creator, and improving the tooling around Ionic.
Ionic stands on the shoulders of giants, and nothing would be possible without Cordova, the most popular cross-platform mobile toolkit in use today. We’re so fortunate to be a part of such an amazing community of web developers building native apps, and we are eager to use more of our resources to better support that foundation. Stay tuned for Ionic to play a bigger role in the native/Cordova plugin ecosystem as we expand the scope of ngCordova and its successor, Ionic Native.
Ionic has truly become a worldwide sensation that exceeded any of our wildest expectations, back when we were just a small bootstrapped startup from the Midwest. More than anything, I’m proud that this fledgling open source project enabled people around the world to build amazing things right where they are, helping their communities and their own prospects in the process. I know we’ve been told many times we couldn’t pull this off, or we were stupid for building an open source/tech company outside of Silicon Valley. I feel personally connected with those in our community who are trying to overcome geographical concerns and hope we can continue to break down barriers through technology. I strongly believe the future of tech is going to be Everywhere Else.
From all of us at Ionic, we thank you so much for the amazing support and excitement over the last two years. Don’t go anywhere, we’re just getting started!
Sincerely,
The Ionic Team
Adam, Brandy, Mike, Katie, Ben, Matt, Cristina, Tim, Dan, Erin, Rudy, Justin, Liz, Dan B, Josh, Eric, Brody, Lee, Perry, Max, and you?
Read more about the funding on VentureBeat and the General Catalyst blog post.