Engine Yard Gets $15m Cash Injection; Buys Enough Red Bull To Keep The Lead For 37 Years?
Engine Yard, probably the first major Rails-focused hosting company, has today taken a second round of finance of $15m. This second round, from Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates, follows on from January's $3.5m from Benchmark.
So where will the money go? Ezra Zygmuntowicz says:
We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.
This assertion is without doubt, as Engine Yard continues to fund and support the development of Rubinius and Merb, and supports several popular Ruby and Rails sites with sponsorships. A $15m round for Engine Yard also helps validates the business models surrounding Rails, in a similar way to New Relic's $3.5m funding round in May.
Personally I am convinced that a significant part of Engine Yard's strategy will involve spending the cash on Red Bull in order to keep Engine Yard operating more quickly than the competition. At $2.50 a can, and the current complement of 80 employees, this works out at 75,000 cans of the amber nectar each. At a work-inducing 8 cans each work day, we're looking at about 37 years' worth of Red Bull to keep Engine Yard ahead of the pack.
To close, Ezra has shared some initial info regarding a new Engine Yard project called Vertebra that's worth keeping a look out for:
We’ve also been delving into the cloud computing arena as I think the next 5 years are going to see huge transition from standard hosting models into the cloud. Our upcoming Vertebra project is a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP. You can expect to see the first open source release of Vertebra this summer, I think this is a truly unique and very fun project to work on.
Let's hope Engine Yard's newly acquired cashpile will be enough to get them through the recession and become highly profitable as this area takes off.
(Semi-disclaimer: Engine Yard sponsors RubyFlow, a sister site of Ruby Inside.)
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July 14, 2008 at 4:32 am
Check out this video interview with the CTO and CEO of Engine Yard...Tom and Lance discuss how they take care of absolutely everything for your Rails app, so that you can literally go drinking on launch night:
http://talktech.tv/2008/06/12/interview-with-engine-yard/
July 14, 2008 at 5:49 pm
All the cool kids drink rockstar now, redbull is reserved for jaeger bombs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_(drink)
July 14, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Don't forget to budget trips to the cardiologist for the arrhythmia-inducing energy drink habit.
July 15, 2008 at 1:42 am
Ah, this news inspired me to take action before this Rails thing catches on!
http://www.williambharding.com/blog/rants/oh-woe-are-we-desecrating-rails-for-a-brighter-tomorrow/
July 15, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Wow, must be nice. Red Bull for everyone! Yey!
http://www.crypt.alturl.com
July 15, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Too bad Rails sucks.. Another buzzword language. I would rather spend my time learning Python.
2 words why is sucks. DEPLOYMENT and BOGGY.
I like writing my SQL not letting some framework do it for me.
July 16, 2008 at 12:54 am
...also leave SQL behind, because it's no longer needed in the cloud. In fact, it just plain won't work there!
That's why the experts in this whole deal have released the Google App Engine, where you can do everything you want to do right now, with no hosting headaches and unlimited storage, but you WILL have to learn to use Python, and maybe even (gasp) Django!
Come on over, bring the best you learned from Rails, and teach us a thing or two...
July 30, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Engine Yard founder, Tom Mornini, drinks Rockstar. Not sure what Lance and the others drink.