Benchmark Backs Engine Yard

Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based provider of Ruby on Rails application deployment and support, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital. Mitch Lasky and Peter Fenton of Benchmark will join the engine Yard board of directors.

PRESS RELEASE

Engine Yard, a leading provider of Ruby on Rails application deployment and support, today announced the closing of a $3.5 million Series A investment from Benchmark Capital. The funds will be used to expand the company's global operations, to strengthen its customer service organization worldwide, and to enhance the core technologies that underlie Ruby on Rails applications. Benchmark general partners Mitch Lasky and Peter Fenton will join the company's Board of Directors.

“Ruby on Rails has attracted growing legions of web developers with its emphasis on elegance, ease of use, and rapid time to market,” said Mr. Lasky. “As the Rails community matures and makes greater inroads into the enterprise, Engine Yard's scalable, robust deployment solutions are increasingly necessary to achieve industry-leading application performance. With an unwavering commitment to customer service, Engine Yard has built a strong and loyal base of customers and attracted some of the best and brightest talent in the Ruby on Rails community.”

Ruby on Rails is an open source web framework that enables developers to create modern, database-driven web applications more quickly than existing technologies. Engine Yard provides the infrastructure and 24/7 operations support required to host and manage business-critical Rails applications. Its cluster architecture is designed to maximize web server performance, database efficiency, and security, and contains redundant hardware and software for high reliability and long-term scalability.

“Engine Yard was founded with a single purpose in mind: to provide the people, tools and support necessary for our customers to deploy and scale Rails applications with little effort,” said Lance Walley, chief executive officer of Engine Yard. “With a strong history in open source, Benchmark recognizes the potential of the Rails movement and is committed to helping us build a world-class operation to support it.”

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard is a leading provider of Ruby on Rails application deployment and support. The company combines its cluster computing platform with 24/7 customer service to provide a highly reliable, scalable infrastructure for deploying and managing mission-critical web applications. Benchmark Capital is an investor in the privately-held, San Francisco-based company which was founded in 2006 and profitable in 2007. For more information, visit http://www.engineyard.com .

About Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital, a leading international venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark's general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm's portfolio companies. Benchmark's portfolio includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages more than USD 2.4 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit its website at http://www.benchmark.com .