$38.5M investment will help Squarespace revolutionize online publishing
NEW YORK, NY – July 14, 2010 – Squarespace, an industry leading web publishing platform, today announced that it closed a $38.5M minority growth investment led by Index Ventures and Accel Partners. This is the first outside capital that Squarespace has raised since its founding in 2003.
As part of this transaction, joining Squarespace’s newly formed board will be Dominique Vidal, of Index Ventures growth team, Andrew Braccia, from Accel’s investment team, and Jonathan Klein, Founder and CEO of Getty Images. Founder Anthony Casalena will remain the company’s largest shareholder.
Squarespace was founded by Anthony Casalena with the goal of redefining publishing on the Web. Today, Squarespace’s SaaS platform powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Businesses, bloggers, web developers and artists use Squarespace to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high quality websites. Squarespace’s product is differentiated by its intense focus on design, integration and scalability. Notable customers include Marc Ecko, Porter Novelli, Bob Woodruff, Kevin Pollak, Don Imus and more.
“Squarespace has created a powerful product used by web developers, bloggers, and consumers around the world to build beautiful, functional and flexible websites,” said Dom Vidal, partner, Index Ventures. “We believe in the team, the technology, and the market potential, and are excited to be a part of such a fast growing business.”
The size of the round will enable Squarespace to significantly expand operations as they seek to solve the problem of content management at its core, and allow its new partners to contribute to and participate in Squarespace’s continued success.
“Squarespace has been a profitable business since its first year of operation. This investment will not change that, but it will allow us to be much more aggressive in our quest to both create an incredible product and bring that product to market,” said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s founder.
With the Squarespace web publishing platform, you can:
- Quickly publish and manage a highly functional web site, including a blog and portfolio.
- Host on an expandable grid infrastructure that can manage sites of any size across the globe.
- Access hand designed templates and customizable photo galleries.
- Aggregate data from across various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment, without needing 3rd party scripts.
- Use the iPhone app to check your site, post to your blog, manage blog posts, and see site traffic, while on the go.
- Easily import images, posts, and links from existing blogging platforms.
- Track visitors and usage patterns of your website with the powerful analytics tools.
“There are a lot of tools on the market that allow people to set up simple blogs for free. At Squarespace, we offer something different – a high quality, professional, reliable platform that is designed from the ground up by us to work in a very streamlined way,” said Casalena. “The addition of Index, Accel and Jonathan Klein to the Squarespace team will help us achieve further growth and cement our position as a clear leader in this space.”
Squarespace packages are sold on www.squarespace.com and start at $8 per month.
About Squarespace
Squarespace, the industry’s leading web publishing platform, was founded in 2003 by then 21-year-old Anthony Casalena. The company, based in New York, powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Squarespace caters to a core base of businesses, bloggers, web developers and artists who are looking for an end-to-end solution for creating, publishing, and managing a high quality website.
About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm active in technology, biotech and clean tech venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The firm has offices in Geneva, London and Jersey and focuses on investments from seed through growth stage companies. Index’s current portfolio includes Adconion, Criteo, Boku, MOO, Rightscal, Tweetup and Trialpay. Exits of note include Playfish (acquired by Electronic Arts), MySQL (acquired by Sun), Last.fm (CBS) and Skype. For more information, please visit www.indexventures.com.
About Accel Partners
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of excellence and innovation in venture capital, and is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, London, UK, New Delhi and Bangalore, India as well as in China via the IDG-Accel Partnership. With over $6 billion under management, Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including: Actuate, Acopia, AdMob, Agile Software, Alfresco, AMCC, Arrowpoint, BBN, Brightcove, ComScore, Etsy, Facebook, Foundry Networks, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Groupon, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, JBoss, Kayak, Macromedia, Maven Networks, metroPCS, NextG Networks, Polycom/PictureTel, Portal Software, QlikTech, Rapt, Real Networks, Redback Networks, Riverbed, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, Wily Technology, XenSource and Zimbra. For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com., or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.