This just in: Wix.com, the Israeli flash website creation platform, has received a $3.5 million in round B, led by previous investors Mangrove Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. To date Wix has raised $8.5 million including this round.
In addition, as hinted by Co-CEO Allon Bloch in a VC Cafe interview a few months ago, Wix is announcing the release of Wix Premium Upgrades. For a promotional price of $5.95, users will be able to link their own domain and remove the Wix promotional links. A hosting option will also be provided.
Since launching in open beta in June this year, Wix has enjoyed rapid growth primarily through word of mouth marketing. The official press release offers a few interesting stats:
– Hundreds of thousands of unique users
– Over 1,500 new web sites are created daily – explore some of the better ones in the Wix Gallery
– Over 600 new widgets are created daily
– Thousands of new subscribers join Wix daily
Indeed, according to Compete, US traffic has gradually grown to 70K unique users a month:
The service has been popular with small businesses looking for a quick and cheap way to achieve web presence.
The funds have not commented on the recent round, but in an interview to The Deal, Allon Bloch commented on the timing of the investment:
“We were fairly lucky. The funding environment over the past three or four weeks has deteriorated fairly quickly. We definitely felt a change.”
Bloch also added that Wix will probably raise additional $5 million in about 18 months for scalability.
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He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
