Our Series A Investment in Laravel: The Future of Shipping
The first time we met Taylor Otwell it was clear he had only scratched the surface of his long-term vision for Laravel. It took us a year of persistence and 21 cold calls to get in front of Taylor for eggs and biscuits in Little Rock, and during that time, we’d attended Laracon meetups in Portugal, Ahmedabad, and Nashville. From one event to the next, we observed the builder ethos of Laravel, a passionate community of developers committed to supporting each other, contributing to the open source project, and shipping great products. By any description, Taylor had it all—vibrant business, beautiful family, idyllic lifestyle (and, yes, a Lamborghini)—all while running a bootstrapped, profitable business far outside the Bay Area.
Yet he felt he owed it to the Laravel community to do more, to really “go for it” with an ambitious roadmap to unlock new levels of productivity and joy for Laravel users. Taylor dazzled us with his inspiration for the future of Laravel, his clarity of vision, and his deep love for the Laravel community—he simply lacked the resources to weave it all together. Today we’re pleased to announce Accel’s support of Taylor’s vision with a $57 million Series A investment into Laravel.
Laravel’s web application development frameworks are foundational to many of the products and services that underpin modern work (for example, Square’s commerce engine, a Fortune 10 retailer’s internal CRM, and the Milwaukee Bucks website are all built on Laravel). With Laravel tooling, a developer can get from idea to application quickly and delightfully, but to host, scale, and improve that application, the developer historically needed to tie in a number of downstream services at additional cost and complexity. Taylor dreamed of providing those services within a holistic Laravel experience, and as he announced last week at Laracon, Laravel Cloud will do just that—“from hello world to hello web in under a minute.”
