February 20, 2020
  • Announcements
  • business
  • Ionic

Announcing our $6M raise and the road ahead

Max Lynch

CEO

I am incredibly excited to announce that Ionic has raised an additional $6M in funding, lead by pre Arthur Ventures, and with General Catalyst participating. This brings Ionic’s total funding to $18M from some wonderful investors.

I’d like to first thank our investors and advisors for your support in this process and your belief in Ionic. It means the world to us and we take your confidence in us very seriously. And thank you to the wonderful team here for your hard work, dedication, and focus on doing what is right for Ionic’s customers and users. Finally, thank you to the amazing community for building such wonderful apps and inspiring us each and every day. You are the backbone of Ionic and nothing we do would be possible without you.

Ionic is in a very interesting position today. As a startup that is on the cusp of profitability, we didn’t need to raise any more money. We decided last year that we wanted to run Ionic differently, and instead of raising larger and larger rounds of funding and spending dangerously, we wanted to build a company that would last. We reject the binary outcome of becoming a unicorn or crashing and burning, and we think employees and customers increasingly reject that, too. We believe the best way to be successful is to spend responsibly and focus relentlessly on delighting our customers and keeping our heads down. Our current investors are thrilled with that approach and believe it will lead to the best possible outcomes for all involved, including employees and customers.

That doesn’t mean Ionic isn’t ambitious or growing quickly! In fact, a key part of this raise was Ionic’s impressive growth in the enterprise over the last two years. In a little over 24 months, we’ve added 150 enterprise customers across nearly every industry on earth, and powering some seriously mission critical apps with millions of users and touching billions of dollars of revenue. Our entire mission is to help every company on earth become a software company regardless of what their actual core business is, because we believe embedding software into every corner of a company is not only the smart thing to do but increasingly required in order to stay competitive.

That mission is seriously resonating, and companies are finding Ionic’s balance of developer friendliness, productivity, cost-effectiveness, open source foundation, and enterprise-level of service to be very appealing. Especially in an industry where most technology is volunteer-driven or built to power an internal use case at a company rather than being in business for users of that technology.

And while Ionic has turned its commercial focus to the enterprise, the open source Ionic Framework continues to grow and prove that the open source community behind Ionic has so much more potential. Today Ionic apps power over 10% of both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store! And with recent releases supporting React and Vue and beginning to target the entire web development ecosystem (in addition to Angular!), the Ionic community is primed to go through a big transformation. We are keeping our promise to the community that we can balance being a strong enterprise business while also continuing to treat our open source products as the most important things we build, and releases like Ionic 5 prove that.

As we look forward to the rest of 2020 and beyond, we have a simple goal in mind: making app development easier. We are constantly asking ourselves what we can do to make building apps more accessible, affordable, and efficient. That is leading us to imagine ways we can be more opinionated in some cases and build tooling around specific tasks every app developer has to perform but which don’t contribute meaningfully to what makes their app unique. We hope to take the wraps off some of those ideas later this year.

With that, it’s time to get back to the work. Thanks again to our investors, employees, and community for believing in this mission and finding it worthwhile. We believe the opportunity in front of Ionic is truly massive and we couldn’t do it without each and every one of you. Thank you.

P.S. we’re hiring for a number of engineering and sales roles! Interested? Take a look at this post for more details.

Max Lynch
Co-founder and CEO


Max Lynch

CEO