NGINX Goes Commercial, Raises $3M USD

NGINX, the open-source web server that's the third most popular on the planet and known for its high performance abilities, has managed a three million dollar (USD) series-A round of venture funding as commercial aspirations form.

NGINX Inc, the new company behind this performance-oriented web server raised $3M USD from BV Capital, Runa Capital, and MSD Capital. With announcing this first round of venture funding, the NGINX corporate entity has signed its first commercial customers and is set to open an office in San Francisco before year's end. NGINX Inc is also looking out for "business and technology partnerships" throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

From the press release, "In the middle of 2012, NGINX will offer a commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform. NGINX will also offer flexible options to upgrade existing web installations to modern and efficient high density web software."

Additionally, NGINX will be investing in deeper customer support, better documentation, and streamlined development processes.

NGINX is reported to be powering more than 40 million web-sites (just shy of 10% market share) and the most popular web server after Apache and Microsoft IIS. Compared to Apache, NGINX is designed to offer faster performance (especially with static content) while using less memory and other system resources. Requests to the NGINX web server are a-synchronous event-driven.

NGINX supports the usual web server features like load balancing, SSL support, URL rewriting, WebDAV, virtual servers, and reverse proxy with caching. This open-source web server can also serve as a mail proxy where it can handle SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. Among the competing web server projects with a lightweight performance focus are lighttpd and Cherokee.

Congratulations and best of luck to Igor Sysoev (the NGINX project founder and lead developer) and others involved on this round of venture funding. For those interested in measuring web server performance, both Apache and NGINX are available for automated server benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite with OpenBenchmarking.org.