By now the dust has settled a bit on our funding news, and I thought I’d share some thoughts on the history and motivations around raising this latest round. In case you missed it, today we announced to the world that we’ve raised a $4M Series A round of funding, led by the fine folks at Five Elms in KC, along with many of our existing investors – Linseed, Ludlow, Lightbank, HPVP and a handful of others.

Here’s just some of today’s coverage:

TechCrunch – Flywheel raises $4M for its designer-focused WordPress hosting platform

SPN – Flywheel raises $4 million in Series A, led by Five Elms

KCBJ – Five Elms leads $4M investment in Omaha tech company

One of the pretty cool things about this round is that Flywheel was in the (unique) position of not really needing to raise money – we’ve got a large and growing customer base and cash in the bank. With the seed round of funding from a year and a half ago, we were able to build a fast-growing and profitable business, and have established ourselves as one of the top players in the WordPress hosting market.

That said, we’ve long talked about Flywheel as “a software company that happens to host websites,” and to that end, one of the things that funding allows us to do is continue to innovate and add features and functionality to our platform for designers and agencies.

We could have grown both quickly and organically, continuing to add features every now and then and products ad-hoc over the next few years. On the other hand, we realized that we could raise money with some like-minded partners and laser-focus our efforts on building THE WordPress platform of choice for web designers. Our partnership with Five Elms allows us to do just that (in addition to adding a bit of fuel to our sales and marketing fires).

So here we are! We couldn’t ask for better partners than the team from Five Elms, who we’ve known for many years and are excited to work with side-by-side. We’ve also got an amazing team of creative, passionate Flywheelers who are excited for what the future holds. And we’re just getting started transforming the hosting industry for the people who design and build the majority of the sites in the world: designers and agencies.

Rick, Tony & myself have said for a long time that we’re out to build a beautiful, fun, impactful technology company on the Silicon Prairie – we’re building “an empire” if you will. Today is an exciting step in that direction.

P.S. And to celebrate, Rick smashed a champagne bottle into a wall (on the second try, at least) 😀