Meteor Development Group, the company behind the Meteor open-source project, which produces a platform for building software applications, today announced $11.2 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Matrix Partners and others also participated in the Series A round. A "dream team" of enterprise technology leaders will advise the company.
Applications written with Meteor run on a user's own computer -- inside their browser or on their mobile device -- and fetch any needed data from cloud services. This is a sharp break from the model by web applications for the past 15 years, where applications run on distant web servers. Running the application on the user's computer gives a smoother, more responsive experience that is increasingly expected by consumers. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter use this technique in their flagship products, but it's out of reach for most developers because it takes months of work even for a team of experts.
The Meteor Project is a collaboration between a group of developers who are experts in building this new kind of application. Its goal is to put the new technology in the hands of everyone. Because the Meteor platform is open source, any person or company may use it for free, or modify it to suit their needs. And Meteor apps can be written entirely in JavaScript, which is among the easiest programming languages to learn and is often known by people such as graphic designers who may not have a traditional background in programming.
"We want to create the universal standard for writing this kind of application, and that will only happen through broad industry cooperation," said Meteor co-author Matt DeBergalis. "It's clear to everyone that we need something new. Will it be Meteor? What we see today is that it is open source developers who drive the technology that is ultimately adopted everywhere else in the industry. So it depends on whether the open-source community chooses to rally around Meteor."
The new funding comes in the form of a Series A investment in Meteor Development Group, a corporation controlled by Geoff Schmidt, Matt DeBergalis, and Nick Martin, the original authors of Meteor. The company will use the money to support Meteor development and grow the Meteor community, and plans to sell a complementary set of enterprise-grade operations management tools to large organizations that are using Meteor.
"JavaScript is fast becoming the most popular programming language for web development and Meteor is front and center in the JavaScript community. By addressing simplicity and scalability, Meteor is a great platform for enterprise web development," said Peter Levine, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz. "We are delighted to be partnering with Geoff, Matt, and Nick as they build out the next generation web development tools."
Rod Johnson will join the company's board. Dr. Johnson is the author of the popular open source Spring application framework and founder of SpringSource, acquired by VMware. David Skok, general partner at Matrix Partners, and Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will serve as special advisors to the company. Previously, Mr. Skok built the enterprise sales strategy for JBoss, the open source Java application, server while Mr. Levine is the former CEO of Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix Systems.
"Rod, David, and Peter are our dream team," explained Mr. Schmidt. "They know more than anyone else about building open-source technology for the enterprise."
"Every once in awhile a new application development framework comes along that dramatically accelerates the way people create applications," said Mr. Skok. "Those rare platforms that excite developers ultimately revitalize software development and spur new creativity. Though it's still early, Meteor appears to be the next big thing in Web application development as it delights both its expert and novice users."
"Today, we're in the midst of the biggest architectural change since the rise of the web. Traditional web application architectures don't cut it anymore, as users expect a better experience," said Dr. Johnson. "I believe that Meteor can lead this transformation in web technology, and I'm excited to join their board. Meteor not only enables web developers to develop rich applications spanning multiple client types, it makes web development fun again."
Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A, which included significant participation by Matrix Partners. Other investors include Maynard Webb, who sits on the boards of Salesforce and Yahoo; Paul Buchheit, author of Gmail; James Lindenbaum, cofounder of Heroku; Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook; Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit; Y Combinator; Ron Conway; Yuri Milner; and Aaron Iba, coauthor of EtherPad.
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