Elementor raises $15M for its WordPress website builder

WordPress has become so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that it still drives a huge ecosystem of startups that build tools and services around the platform. One of these is Elementor, a graphical website building platform that you can plug into WordPress to design and publish sites. More than 4 million sites have already been built with the tool — and it’s now seeing a million new sites every six months.

Now the Tel Aviv-based company, which was founded in 2016, has raised its first round of institutional funding — a $15 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“Elementor’s growth is a wonderful example of the power of community and open-source software,” said Tal Morgenstern, partner at Lightspeed. “The founders set out to solve their own problems as web professionals and ended up with a global, highly involved fan base that kept pushing and shaping the product from the very onset. Every single metric we looked at indicated an exceptionally strong market fit and we’re extremely happy to partner with this team for the next chapter of their journey.”

Elementor gives designers everything from a visual editor to a set of pre-made templates, widgets for most standard use cases and, for paying users, support for building popups, themes and building WooCommerce sites. A lot of these features are available for free, but access to the paid tools starts at $49/year for a single site or up to $199/year for agencies that handle up to 1,000 sites.

“What we have achieved, thanks to our dedicated team and wonderful community, has been truly extraordinary,” said Yoni Luksenberg, CEO of Elementor, “In addressing a very real need, we have claimed a growing stake in a $300 billion market. With this round of funding, we accelerate our goal of allowing every web creator to easily build professional websites.”

The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to accelerate its operations and global community. For 2020 alone, Elementor is planning about 500 meetups, the company says, and will grow its team by 50%.

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