SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Open source web server developer NGINX has received $3 million in a fully subscribed Series A round. Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet, and over 20% of the top 1,000 busiest websites around the world, including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, LivingSocial, Hulu, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress.

NGINX's unique ability to deliver 10 times performance improvements on existing hardware - combined with lean architecture, scalability and security - has propelled the company's ascent as the fastest and only-growing web server in the world with a market share of 8.5% across all domains. In its most recent survey, Netcraft states, "If current trends continue NGINX will soon overtake Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites."(1)

The investment includes funding from BV Capital and Runa Capital and an entity affiliated with MSD Capital, the private investment firm for Dell Inc. Chairman and CEO Michael S. Dell. The funding will be used to support the company's plans for its new commercial arm, Nginx, Inc., and its expansion into the U.S.

"By ensuring on-demand, high performance infrastructure product matching the needs of modern online businesses, NGINX has established itself as the second most popular open source web server in the world and the only one with a growing market share," said Dmitry Chikhachev of Runa Capital. "It all makes the company a very attractive investment, particularly as NGINX prepares to build on its success with the launch of new commercial solutions."

"Several of the companies we invested in were able to solve significant scaling issues by switching their web platforms to NGINX," said Thomas Gieselmann of BV Capital. "NGINX transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today."

NGINX Expansion NGINX will open its new San Francisco headquarters in Q4 2011. The company has already signed its first commercial customers and is currently establishing business and technology partnerships in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

"The timing in the market may be prime for NGINX as a newly funded and strong-trajectory software company - and one which has done so little in the way of marketing," commented Agatha Poon of analyst firm Tier1 Research. "For service providers, there is another choice in the market for workloads that are becoming increasingly demanding."

In the middle of 2012, NGINX will offer a commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform, which will enable advanced performance, traffic management, extended configuration and security features for hosting, cloud and enterprise server infrastructure. NGINX will also offer flexible options to upgrade existing web installations to modern and efficient high density web software.

"My advice to anyone running a web site today who is hitting performance constraints is to investigate whether they can use NGINX," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, which built its web performance and security platform using NGINX as a foundation. "CloudFlare has been able to scale over the last year to handle more than 15 billion monthly page views with a relatively modest infrastructure, in large part because of the scalability of NGINX. Our experience shows that switching to NGINX enables full utilization of the modern operating system and existing hardware resources."

Among the company's main priorities for its open source product used by millions of web sites on the Internet are deeper levels of customer support, better documentation and streamlined development. "NGINX has received overwhelming support from the open source community," said Igor Sysoev, the author of the software. "This investment allows us to take the performance and efficiency of NGINX to yet another level, strengthening its core advantages with long-awaited functionality."

About NGINX From its earliest inception, NGINX has been driven by an understanding that Internet usage would explode with an increasing expectation of instant response from online services. NGINX was designed to enable the companies to adjust to this new reality of heavy Internet consumption without incurring unnecessary costs in capital investments or time.

NGINX has grown organically over the past 10 years of development thanks to the vision of Igor Sysoev and the enthusiasm and support of a loyal community of users and developers.