Elementor, developer of a plug-in for WordPress for designing websites, announced its first acquisition today. Elementor is buying Jerusalem-based startup Strattic, developer of technology meant to improve the response time and security of WordPress websites, for a sum in the millions of dollars.
Separately, "Globes" has learned that, last year, Elementor raised additional capital, unreported until now, of $50 million. The round was an internal one from US VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is Elementor’s main investor. This is in addition to $16 million raised by Elementor previously.
Elementor was founded in 2015 by CEO Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein. The company has developed a plug-in for free open-source website content management system WordPress that provides professional design capabilities. WordPress is used to manage 43% of the ten million most popular websites, according to a W3Techs survey, and Elementor is one of its most popular plug-ins.
Elementor’s original product is a plug-in that costs $49 a year to use for the basic version (there is also a free version). A few months ago, the company launched a package called Elementor Cloud Website that combines the plug-in with website cloud hosting, and that costs $99 a year. Elementor’s market consists of Internet creators, which covers website building agencies and freelancers, but also professionals such as wedding photographers, who build websites for themselves. The company employs some 400 people.
The acquired company, Strattic, was founded by CEO Miriam Schwab and COO Josh Lawrence in 2016. The company’s CTO is Zeev Suraski, one of the developers of the PHP programming language. The company employs sixteen people, who will join Elementor. Strattic raised $6.5 million in a seed round, but is apparently being bought for less than that.
Elementor intends to offer Strattic’s product, which turns WordPress sites into sites based on JAMstack architecture, separately, and to use its marketing operation to promote it. The product reduces the number of calls to the website’s database, and makes the site more secure. "If you’re a large company, you can’t afford for your product to be heavy, and that’s a problem that large companies have that build websites using WordPress. Companies have to employ a team of Devops people to ensure that the website loads quickly," says Luksenberg. "We want to preserve the Strattic brand and use it to break into new markets, such as larger companies."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 8, 2022.
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