Pantheon raises $21.5 million to expand its web hosting platform

Pantheon, which currently offers a professional hosting solution for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it has raised a $21.5 million Series B funding round led by Rory O’Driscoll at Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Dev Ittycheria at OpenView Venture Partners. Existing investors Foundry Group and First Round Capital also participated in this round. The company, which launched in early 2012, started out as a Drupal hosting solution, but recently expanded into the fast-growing WordPress hosting market as well. The company currently runs about 65,000 sites on its platform, up from 55,000 last September.

You’d think that applications like Drupal and WordPress would be as easy to deploy as they are to use. After all, these two are the two leading open source content management systems used for business websites. WordPress in particular powers many millions of blogs around the world and it’s an eminently usable solution. Between the two of them, these solutions power over 50% of business CMS websites globally today. So you’d think actually setting it up would be to, right? You’d also think that running applications on top of cloud infrastructure should be pretty easy these days, right? With all these automation platforms and more and more of the technical nitty gritty being abstracted away from application owners, it should just work, right? Well if you believe Pantheon’s story, the reality is very different. Pantheon, founded in 2010, is a website hosting platform.