Nginx, an open source web server publisher (pronounced “engine-x”), secured $10 million in a Series B Round of financing from New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The round also included full participation of existing Series A investors, Moscow-based early stage venture fund Runa Capital, US fund MDS Capital and US-German fund e.ventures, as well as participation from Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of Box.
The funds raised will be used to “increase development efforts for both the community and commercial version of NGINX and also further build out their global sales, services and support organization to handle the increasing customer demand.”
Ngnix expects to recruit 35 new employees, especially in the areas of sales and support, to reach a total team size of 50 in 2014.
Nginx claims it has established its technology as the default content delivery and acceleration tool for “over 120 million sites around the world,” making it “the most popular web server for the top one thousand busiest websites.”
As of October 2013, Nginx was used by 16% of all web sites, according to UK Internet security and research company Netcraft. It powers more of the world’s top 1,000 sites than Microsoft IIS and Appache and is used by almost two-thirds of all Russian sites. It is also used by companies including Facebook, Netflix, WordPress, Box, Instagram, GitHub, Zappos and more.
Nginx’s founder, Igor Sysoev, is a former system administrator at Rambler, a pioneer Russian web company. He initially released his server software in 2004 and has been developing his web server solution since that time. Nginx was formally incorporated as a company in August 2011. The startup, founded in Moscow, is now headquartered in San Francisco.
In August this year, the company launched NGINX Plus, a subscription-based version of its software with advanced features and professional services. The product already has over 100 paying customers.
In October 2011, Ngnix raised $3 million from e.ventures, Runa Capital and MSD Capital.
