Nitrous.IO closed a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) that will fund the expansion of the cloud-based developer platform that is quickly becoming the go-to solution for development teams seeking power, flexibility and speed.

Nitrous.IO draws its name from the racing world: Expert drivers add nitrous oxide to their engines to increase power and performance. Like racecar drivers, Software Developers are performance enthusiasts: they want to build applications quickly and effortlessly. With Nitrous.IO, developers can create PHP, Java, NodeJS, Python, Ruby and Go development environments in the cloud in just seconds. They can edit code via a browser-based Web IDE or from their favorite code editor. Teammates can code collaboratively in any modern web browser from anywhere in the world.

Nitrous.IO already counts Heroku, Hashrocket and over 100,000 developers from 4,000 organizations among its users. The platform has grown at over 50% month-over-month exclusively through word-of-mouth within the development community. During the first 7-months of public beta, Nitrous.IO has helped engineering departments save over 500,000 hours of development time -- a value of approximately $40M in cost savings to engineering organizations. As a testament to its value to the development community, Nitrous.IO was recently selected by Amazon Web Services (AWS) as one of only 11 recommended tools and platforms in their AWS Activate Program. Within this highly curated list of proven vendors, Nitrous.IO is the only platform for application development.

'Incredibly, the same developers who build wonderful cloud-based apps are themselves still chained to their local dev environments, which they must painstakingly debug and maintain,' said Sunil Nagaraj, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. 'Bessemer is proud to have incubated what we believe to be the future of professional software development in the cloud.'

Hashrocket, a leading web development consultancy with over 30 engineers, uses Nitrous.IO daily to improve its collaborative development workflow. Johnny Winn, a lead developer at Hashrocket, shares about his experience with the platform:

'Nitrous.IO provides the perfect platform for me to collaborate with talented engineers around the world. I can give an engineer access to my code in a few clicks. And within minutes we can solve a problem together on a real dev environment without making them download or learn any new tools. Nitrous.IO is like having a cell phone in the age of telegraph.'

The Series A round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Eduardo Saverin, Co-founder of Facebook, Golden Gate Ventures, Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, Larry Link, former SVP of Palo Alto Networks, Razmig Hovaghimian, CEO of Viki.com, and Hari Kumar of Lion Rock Capital. Sunil Nagaraj of Bessemer Venture Partners joins the board along with Andrew J. Solimine, CEO of Nitrous.IO.

About Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO provides powerful, fast, preconfigured development environments in the cloud that can be accessed anywhere from any modern web browser. Developers can create and start programming in a brand new PHP, Java, Node.JS, Python, Ruby or Go development environment -- in a matter of seconds -- from any modern browser or using their favorite local editors, while easily inviting collaborators worldwide to contribute using the individual tools they love combined with the convenience of cloud. Over 100,000 developers have created and shared development environments for professional, open-source, and personal projects using Nitrous.IO. Learn about product updates and announcements via Twitter @nitrousio.

About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) invests in early-stage, hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, Cambridge, New York, Mumbai, Bangalore, Herzliya and Sao Paolo. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like LinkedIn, Yelp, Skype, CornerstoneOnDemand, Pinterest, Box and Twilio. Over 100 BVP companies have gone public. Learn more at bvp.com and follow us on Twitter @BessemerVP