Our Series A Investment in Laravel: The Future of Shipping

The first time we met Taylor Otwell it was clear he had only scratched the surface of his long-term vision for Laravel. It took us a year of persistence and 21 cold calls to get in front of Taylor for eggs and biscuits in Little Rock, and during that time, we’d attended Laracon meetups in Portugal, Ahmedabad, and Nashville. From one event to the next, we observed the builder ethos of Laravel, a passionate community of developers committed to supporting each other, contributing to the open source project, and shipping great products.  By any description, Taylor had it all—vibrant business, beautiful family, idyllic lifestyle (and, yes, a Lamborghini)—all while running a bootstrapped, profitable business far outside the Bay Area.

Yet he felt he owed it to the Laravel community to do more, to really “go for it” with an ambitious roadmap to unlock new levels of productivity and joy for Laravel users.  Taylor dazzled us with his inspiration for the future of Laravel, his clarity of vision, and his deep love for the Laravel community—he simply lacked the resources to weave it all together.  Today we’re pleased to announce Accel’s support of Taylor’s vision with a $57 million Series A investment into Laravel.

Laravel’s web application development frameworks are foundational to many of the products and services that underpin modern work (for example, Square’s commerce engine, a Fortune 10 retailer’s internal CRM, and the Milwaukee Bucks website are all built on Laravel). With Laravel tooling, a developer can get from idea to application quickly and delightfully, but to host, scale, and improve that application, the developer historically needed to tie in a number of downstream services at additional cost and complexity.  Taylor dreamed of providing those services within a holistic Laravel experience, and as he announced last week at Laracon, Laravel Cloud will do just that—“from hello world to hello web in under a minute.”

Laravel Cloud is a transformative product and just a preview of what Taylor and his team can accomplish. Like Mike and Scott from Atlassian, Ryan from Qualtrics, Vlad and Bryant from Webflow, and other bootstrapped Founders we’ve been fortunate to partner with, Taylor is customer-obsessed and will use the funds not to change but to amplify his vision.  Already he is off to the races: Laravel has more than tripled its engineering capacity, given equity to its entire team, brought a number of longtime Laravel builders formally into the company, and just launched a platform product to enthusiastic reviews. Hear more about what Taylor’s been working on here.

Taylor likes to say that the Laravel community “just has good vibes.” We think the company he’s building does, too. At Accel, we’ve long believed that innovation is a global phenomenon, and that companies built in places like Sydney, Provo, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Vancouver, and Little Rock are reshaping the technology landscape.  The good vibes of Laravel drive forward this trend, and we’re excited to back Taylor for the journey ahead.