Israeli professional website builder platform Elementor announced today that it has completed a $15 million first financing round from Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company, which enables professional web creators to build websites, competes with Wix, Trend reports with reference to Globes.
Elementor raised $850,000 in its seed financing round and was already profitable several months after being founded in 2016 by CEO Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein.
Elementor’s open-source, drag-and-drop platform has proven popular with design, development and marketing professionals and within just two years, the first million websites had been built using the no-code editing platform. Elementor’s growth rate is accelerating, now adding 200,000 sites built every month and overall, over 4 million websites have been built using the platform, which is available in 55 languages. The driving force behind Elementor’s rapid and quickening rise has been its active community of dedicated users who have generated 70% of Elementor’s nearly 300 features deployed over the past 12 months.
Luksenberg said, "There are tens of millions of people who define themselves as Internet site producers. It's a new profession. Once they were designers or programmers and now they are website builders. They need to build up their business and we have built a community around them. The community is very active, for example translating to other languages and developing products and services that complement Elementor's environment."
He added, "What we have achieved, thanks to our dedicated team and wonderful community, has been truly extraordinary. In addressing a very real need, we have claimed a growing stake in a $300 billion market. With this round of funding, we accelerate our goal of allowing every web creator to easily build professional websites."
Lightspeed partner Tal Morgenstern said, "Elementor's growth is a wonderful example of the power of community and open-source software. The founders set out to solve their own problems as web professionals and ended up with a global, highly-involved fan base that kept pushing and shaping the product from the very onset. Every single metric we looked at indicated an exceptionally strong market fit and we're extremely happy to partner with this team for the next chapter of their journey."
Elementor will use the funding to accelerate the expansion of its operation and its global community, with 500 meetups planned around the world for 2020. The company also plans to increase its workforce by 50% and is gearing up for major product launches to change the way websites are built.