Engine Yard Raises $15MM

When I started at Engine Yard in January, my employee number was in the low 20's. Today, just half a year later, Engine Yard employs around 80 people and we've just announced that we've raised another $15 million, which should help us move our kick-ass Ruby projects along even faster.

Some things that have happened since I joined Engine Yard in January:

• Rubinius runs Rails
• Apple uses SproutCore, which is built on Merb
• Serious Merb apps getting millions of hits have been launched and are running rock-solid on Engine Yard hardware
• We announced Vertebra and have begun work in earnest. Over the past few months, we've begun to see working prototypes of parts of the project already usable for internal Engine Yard use
• We began work on a Control Panel (I head up the project, code-named "ninja"), which we launched internally last week. Without any exaggeration whatsoever, getting to this point would not have been possible without Corey (atmos). If you're an Engine Yard customer, buy him a beer.
• DataMapper 0.9 was released, and Engine Yard is using it heavily internally, meaning that the Merb/DataMapper stack has gone from being a pipe-dream to being a real, viable-for-production, and used-in-production stack. In LinkedIn's post-RailsConf post, they talk about Merb/DM as the future Ruby web stack.

It would seem as though a list like that should take a years, but all of that has happened in the last six months. It just goes to show how far a little bit of confidence from some savvy investors can go toward progress in the Ruby ecosystem.

Congrats fellow Engine Yarders!