With the web development gold rush still underway, it’s no surprise that companies building developer tools are raking it in.
Cloud9, a startup building an online web development environment, just announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from Balderton Capital. This is Cloud9’s second institutional round.
Cloud9’s product is an online Web development environment, meaning that it enables developers to code right from their browsers, and their work is hosted in the cloud (on Cloud9’s servers or on their own virtual machines). Cloud9 is now compatible with several languages and frameworks, including Django, WordPress, Meteor, C++, Rails, Node.js, PHP, and HTML5. Online web developer environments are also a convenient way to collaborate with teammates or other developers as it easily enables them to plug into the same project, a bit like Google Docs, if you will.
The company also polled about 1,200 of its users, and the results revealed that 64 percent of developers using a cloud-based environment said they won’t switch back to a local one. Just over 57 percent of Cloud9’s users are in teams of one to five people, and 74 percent use it with the Chrome browser (cloud-based environments let developers use Chromebooks, which are designed to be primarily used for cloud-based applications).
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Naturally, Cloud9 is not alone in the quest to bring web development into the cloud and make it just as awesome as desktop integrated development environments (IDEs). Nitrous.io and Koding are two other popular alternatives, though they all support different languages and frameworks, to varying degrees (some support many more languages, while others support fewer but more robustly).
As part of the funding deal, Balderton’s Suranga Chandratillake is joining Cloud9’s board of directors. The company will use the new funding to grow its team and support more languages and frameworks.
Cloud9 was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with an additional office in Amsterdam. The company previously raised $5.6 million from Accel Partners and Atlassian.
Disclosure: The author of this post very briefly worked for a Cloud9 competitor more than a year ago.
