INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
WordPress last week secured its position as a top dog in the world of web development when its parent company Automattic announced a $300
million raise at a $3 billion valuation, just weeks after it snapped up Tumblr from Verizon
But true competition never really ends, and today brings the latest development on that front: Duda, which provides a cloud-based website
today announcing that it has raised $25 million from a single investor, Susquehanna Growth Equity.The funding, which brings the Palo
Alto-based startup to $50 million raised to date, comes as Duda hits some strong milestones
as well as in sales and marketing, and specifically in convincing customers to make the switch to its platform from bigger competitors.To
port sites from the latter to the former, and articulating the reasons why Duda is faster to use, better for pushing updates and preferable
for publishing further websites and web pages at scale
development company, at a time when many thought that mobile web would be a viable, and potentially larger, alternative to building native
apps for mobile platforms
That, of course, never quite materialised as a big business, as apps did indeed continue to boom, and responsive web design meant that it
was much easier to build once for the web and have it simply work on mobile, rather than invest in a separate mobile-web-only build.That
web professionals experience daily due to the lack of suitable web design platforms
Our team has developed a product that integrates all of the components needed for professional-grade web design to effectively serve digital
be hard-coding websites, the company has built a suite of tools to help those who are non-technical designers to be able to build and update
sites with minimal fuss and bugs.The idea here is to provide something much more advanced and customizable than what you might get on a
platform like Wix, but without some of the hiccups that Duda claims you are likely to encounter on WordPress (or via a provider that works
on WP), in part because, as Sadan described it to me, the open-source foundation on which WordPress has been built can throw up a catalog of
errors that are complicated to fix, even for engineers, let alone non-technical staff.The features, for example, include something Duda
These also come with APIs to integrate other data sources into Duda sites
for the thousands of web professionals it serves
ambitions are high at the company
