Webflow

Founded in 2013 by Vlad Magdalin, his brother Sergie Magdalin and their friend, and previous co-worker, Bryant Chou, Webflow offers users a platform to build and host a professional website without knowing how to code.

This round generated $2.9 million in funding for Webflow in 2014. The round included investment from Khosla Ventures, Draper Associates and Rainfall Ventures.

After this initial round of funding, Webflow faced skepticism over its niche and saturated market. Webflow marketed their website builder to the freelance design community as a tool to create websites for clients. And they focused on becoming profitable. This lead to their Series A.

Their Series A generated $72 million for Webflow and left post-financing valuation of Webflow between $350-400 million. Accel lead the round which included Silversmith Capital Partners, Rainfall Ventures, FundersClub, Draper Associates and various angels.

Webflow offers a code-free design focused website builder whose overall look and functionality is reminiscent of Adobe's Creative Suite. They offer basic hosting services under their website plans, which offer a monthly subscription fee from Basic, CMS and Business. The plans have different categorized focuses and scaled pricing.

They also offer ecommerce which allow the user to sell products through their site, starting at their standard plan, to Plus plan to Advanced plan. The plans scale in cost and capability.

The design is drag-and-drop and allows for customization down to the code level. For first time users, or those with little-to-no technical knowledge, Webflow offers its University. There, users can access videos, guides and courses to guide users through the process.

Webflow hosting is provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and facilitated by Fastly and Amazon Cloudfront. This gives their sites quick response times and no worry about server maintenance. Further, their hosting comes with SSL certificates, HTTP/2 compliance, site search, form control, password protection, automatically-generated sitemap and automatic backups.