Twenty years ago, I had the good fortune of growing up down the street from my childhood best friend Albert Pai (now StackBlitz co-founder/CTO). We immediately bonded over computers and together taught ourselves how to build web applications. This was an arduous, painful process largely inhibited by the myriad of complex dependency and consistency issues developers run into every day with local dev environments. We’ve always wished there was a better way, as local environments continue to be a productivity impediment (and security risk) for millions of developers both beginners and professionals alike.
A few years ago, we saw an opportunity to finally close this loop in the same way Figma did for design. By leveraging WebAssembly and other new browser capabilities, we envisioned StackBlitz, a superior development environment that was faster, more secure and consistent than local environments, to enable seamless code collaboration without ever having to set up a local environment.
Last May at Google I/O, our team launched the beta of this new experience powered by our key technology called WebContainers. These environments boot instantly inside your browser tab, are shareable via URL, and provide a step function increase in security posture thanks to browser sandboxing.
Since then, our team has kept quite busy working with the largest open source projects (such as Vite, Remix, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Next) and companies. In doing so, we expanded StackBlitz’s capabilities and we’re happy to report remarkable progress.
Over the past ten months, the response from the developer community has been incredible.
For the first time, in March 2022, our team crossed a huge milestone and had over 2 million developers collaborating with one another on StackBlitz. These developers are creating instant bug reports, sharing live examples for design systems and libraries, rapidly prototyping new ideas, and much more.
As a small team that is only starting to invest in distribution, we’re incredibly grateful to the open source community that has guided our development and spread the word about StackBlitz.
Of the top open source projects listed in 2021 State of JS, six months ago 2% were using StackBlitz. Today, over 70% of the top open source projects have adopted StackBlitz with more joining every week.
We also saw developers from over 2,000 companies - including many global tech leaders like Google, Airbnb, Uber, Meta, Shopify, Stripe, Apple, and Cloudflare - relying on what we’ve built to accelerate their web development.
While we always intended to support developers from startup environments to enterprises, we were surprised by the strong inbound from Fortune 500 enterprises for StackBlitz’s developer productivity and security benefits, and brought those early customers into production while continuing to develop StackBlitz.
Over the past year we’ve been able to 4x our headcount and in 2021 we grew our enterprise revenue by 10x, all while working towards our mission of building the strongest development tools available.
We’ve also partnered with Google, Mozilla, Fastly, Shopify, Amazon, Intel, Arm and others to bring WebContainers to all devices, platforms, languages and runtimes.
Our team has achieved some remarkable things over this past year, but this is just the beginning of our ambitions.
It’s time to make the world’s software faster and more secure.
Today Albert and I are excited to share that our team has raised a $7.9M seed round led by Greylock with support from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub Co-Founder), Jay Srinivasan and Pratyus Patnaik (Appurify & atSpoke Co-Founders), and other leaders across the developer space. This funding will allow us to continue to build the fastest and most secure collaborative web development environments and launch a new suite of developer experiences over the coming quarters.
Up until recently it would have been impossible to build a collaboration tool like StackBlitz. However, thanks to new browser technology and capabilities like WebAssembly and WebContainers, collaboration is now able to reach new heights enabling developers to do their development workloads securely inside of their browser instead of locally or on remote servers. With supply chain attacks increasing and software toolchains becoming more complex, the need for instant secure-by-default computing environments has never been greater, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what this technology can enable.
When we asked what excited Sarah Guo, from Greylock, about investing she shared:
StackBlitz is finally bringing production-grade, full-stack web development to the web, with a magical experience that’s much better than local: faster, more secure, inherently collaborative.
When we backed Figma at the Series A, we saw an opportunity to revolutionize creation and collaboration for designers. Similarly, Stackblitz leverages cutting-edge browser technology to supercharge developer workflows.
Its mass organic adoption by developers reflects the value and uniqueness of its product offering, and we’re thrilled to be working with the team.
With this new funding we are planning to grow our team, expand product functionality, and increase enterprise adoption. Until this point all of our interest has been inbound, so this new capital will create the opportunity to continue expanding our developer relations and open source teams while building out our sales and marketing teams. We also plan to double the size of our R&D organization this year to continue expanding our deep technology and the new experiences it will unlock. If you are interested in learning more about joining our team, please take a look at our open roles.
Thank you to our team, our developer community, and our customers for joining us on our mission to make the world’s software faster and more secure - we are just getting started!
PS — We’ve got something big coming this quarter… join our mailing list and communities on Discord & Twitter for updates. :)
- Eric Simons, Albert Pai, and the StackBlitz team
