Hashnode, a blogging platform built for and dedicated to the global software development community, has received $6.7 million in a Series A fundraise led by Salesforce Ventures, following a $2.1 million seed funding round in December 2020.
Salesforce Ventures is joined by fellow venture capital investors Sierra Ventures, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and Accel Partners, as well as angel investors Naval Ravikant (co-founder, Angellist), Des Traynor (co-founder, Intercom), Guillermo Rauch (co-founder, Vercel), Salil Deshpande (general partner, Uncorrelated) and Ed Roman (managing director, HackVC), a release said.
The funding will be used to continue to grow the platform’s user base, accelerating its mission of becoming the number one platform for software development, engineering and technology content – in turn, powering the creator economy for the rapidly expanding developer community.
There are now nearly 25 million developers working worldwide, so there’s a huge market opportunity for Hashnode to help plug knowledge gaps – particularly important as remote working remains popular among developers.
Hashnode is the first blogging platform built and optimized specifically for the software developer community to support the knowledge sharing economy. Unlike existing sites and blogging platforms, Hashnode does not employ paywalls – content is freely available to readers worldwide – and authors fully own their Hashnode blogs and can map them to their own domains.
This ensures that users never lose access to their content and can continue to reap the SEO benefits, while maintaining connections with Hashnode’s large, global developer community. Hashnode also allows readers to tip authors, ensuring software developers can monetize their work, the release added.
Alex Kayyal, managing partner, Salesforce Ventures, said, “Hashnode’s rapid growth since its launch points to just how important a platform like this is for developers.”
Founded by Fazle Rahman (co-founder and CEO) and Sandeep Panda (co-founder and CTO), Hashnode was launched in June 2020 with the mission of connecting the world’s developers, helping them to share knowledge, grow and build a global community.
In its early days, the platform had 100,000 monthly active users; over the past year, that number has grown to over 1 million, and the platform currently hosts 60,000 active blogs.
Notable bloggers include Quincy Larson (founder, FreeCodeCamp); Peter Friese (developer advocate, Google Firebase); Victoria Lo (engineer, PayPal), Jenna Pederson (senior developer advocate, AWS Cloud); Nader Dabit (developer relations, Edge & Node); and Katherine Peterson (engineer, GitHub).
“Software developers are valuable members of the creator economy, fueling today’s most innovative technologies,” said Fazle Rahman, CEO and co-founder of Hashnode.
“We launched Hashnode because this group deserves a blogging platform built just for them – one where they can easily find each other, share ideas with like-minded professionals, and collaborate to build game-changing technology. With this new funding, we expect we’ll be able to reach even more users across the globe, helping to create a thriving, rich network that elevates the entire profession,” he added.
