It’s been a big year over at Drifty, creators of the popular and fast-growing open source mobile development SDK Ionic.
Late last year our company evolved from just building some cool developer tools servicing over 250,000 developers, into a full-blown platform company focused on enabling more people to build top-quality mobile apps using web technologies.
We started working on Ionic late last year, and released the first version at the end of 2013. The initial reaction blew us away, and the project quickly became one of the top 50 most popular open source projects in the world, with Ionic apps reaching the top lists on the Apple App Store and Google Play store and gaining millions of downloads. We’ve also been fortunate to work with some great partners, like Salesforce and Google.
With our shift in strategy, we decided to raise some money to focus on reaching as many developers as possible with Ionic. We closed a $1M seed round in February from Arthur Ventures, grew the team to 15, and got back to work.
New Office
In August 2014 we said goodbye to our humble office on King St where it all started and moved into an office 4x the size, right above the Merchant off the square. This office gives us enough room to grow from 15 people today up to 30, and lets us enjoy some great cocktails after work. We even have a private elevator right into Merchant which always freaks the other patrons out.
What’s next
Today over 320,000 apps have been built with Ionic, and every month 500k unique developers visit our site to try out our products and to get help from our large community of developers.
But this is just the beginning. We see a future where Ionic can power the next generation of apps built once to run on every phone in the world, and provide reliable infrastructure and services to scale those apps to billions of users.
In early 2015 we will be releasing the first taste of our vision for this complete mobile development platform, which we are calling Ionic.io. Already over 50,000 developers are signed up for the beta.
Thank You
We are so proud to call Madison home, and like to think of ourselves as proof that companies once thought the sole realm of Silicon Valley can not only grow here, but compete and win over their valley competitors.
We’ve been fortunate to receive help and support from the Madison community, which helped us find our first two investors, and hire some super talented people.
The talent is here, the funding is here, and the lifestyle is here. We just need to show the world what we are capable of.
*Note: Our full 2014 update can be found on our blog.