Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of the American CRM giant, has led a $6.7 million (about Rs 50 crore) Series A funding round in Hashnode which is a platform for software development, engineering and technology content.
Venture capital firms Sierra Ventures, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Accel Partners as well as a group of angel investors including Naval Ravikant, co-founder, Angellist; Des Traynor, co-founder, Intercom; Guillermo Rauch, co-founder, Vercel; Salil Deshpande, general partner, Uncorrelated and Ed Roman, managing director, HackVC participated in this round.
The fresh funds will be used primarily on growth initiatives including recruiting new talent, expanding global operations and rolling out new features, the company said in a statement.
New product features planned include team publication, a service allowing entire businesses to leverage the platform to power engineering and tech blogs; expanding it to global developer community; and building an iOS- and Android-compatible mobile app.
Hasnode was part of the fourth cohort of Sequoia Capital India's accelerator and incubation programme Surge. The startup had secured a $2.1 million seed funding round in December 2020 from Surge and a number of angels.
The Bengaluru-based company claims to be the first blogging platform built and optimized specifically for the software developer community. It does not employ paywalls, and authors can fully own their blogs and map them to their own domains on the platform. Hashnode also allows readers to tip authors, offering a window of monetisation for software developers.
Additional developer centric features on the platform include custom CSS (cascading style sheet) to enable unlimited blog customization; detailed analytics for all blogs; embeds support and code highlighting; bulk imports of content from other blogging platforms, including Medium and WordPress; integrations with developer tools and resources, including GitHub, Google Analytics, Hotjar, Fathom Analytics and Plausible.
“Software developers are valuable members of the creator economy, fueling today’s most innovative technologies. We launched Hashnode because this group deserves a blogging platform built just for them – one where they can easily find each other, share ideas with like-minded professionals, and collaborate to build game-changing technology,” Fazle Rahman, CEO and co-founder, Hashnode, said.
Founded by Rahman and Sandeep Panda (CTO) in June 2020, the platform currently has over one million monthly active users and hosts 60,000 active blogs.
Notable bloggers on the platform include Quincy Larson, founder, FreeCodeCamp; Peter Friese, developer advocate, Google Firebase; Victoria Lo, engineer, PayPal; Jenna Pederson, senior developer advocate, AWS Cloud; Nader Dabit, developer relations, Edge & Node; and Katherine Peterson, engineer, GitHub.
“Hashnode’s rapid growth since its launch points to just how important a platform like this is for developers. We’re proud to back innovators like Hashnode as they work to build a global knowledge-sharing community to empower and connect developers, and in time, all technical creators across the globe,” Alex Kayyal, managing partner, Salesforce Ventures said.
