Platform.sh, a cloud platform provider, recently announced that it has secured $140 million in Series D funding round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Digital+ Partners along with existing investors, Partech, Hilinov, Eurazeo, and BGV. The company plans to focus on enhancing automation capabilities with the newly raised funding. A part of it will also be used to fund future acquisitions to help accelerate its growth.

Platform.sh named Leader in G2’s PaaS category

Platform.sh is an end-to-end platform as a service (PaaS) provider for web applications. The company, headquartered in France, aims to help developers concentrate on building scalable applications while it manages the hosting and deployment of these apps.

In its recently released Summer 2022 Grid® Report for Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), G2 observes that Platform.sh, founded in 2015, features in the Leaders quadrant in a category dominated by established enterprise organizations such as AWS, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. It achieved this feat just five years after its inception.

Reviewers of Platform.sh on G2 appreciate the ease of setup, use, and the quality of support that the solution provides. Reviews also show that it takes just about one and a half months on average to set up the software and start getting a return on investment in eight months.

“Platform.sh can help make developers’ lives easier by abstracting away much of the underlying web app infrastructure.”

Fred Plais
CEO, Platform.sh.
(Source)

Platform.sh includes a diverse library of development languages and frameworks, flexible workflows, and built-in tools to manage the application lifecycle at scale. More than 5000 companies, including Nestle, Adobe, and Financial Times, use Platform.sh to manage and deploy their applications. 

PaaS customers look for tools that can monitor the performance and health of applications running on their platforms. Platform.sh took a step to address this last year when it acquired Blackfire.io, an application management tool that helps monitor and provide visibility into applications on the platform.

Platform.sh also features in Continuous Delivery Software, WebOps Platforms, Build Automation Software, Web Hosting Providers, and Managed Hosting Providers categories on G2.

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Source: Platform.sh

Power of PaaS

Cloud has revolutionized computing. But developing applications in a cloud-native environment can be complicated due to a multitude of languages, frameworks, and infrastructure. Previously, developers spent a lot of time managing the infrastructure required to develop their applications.

PaaS bridges this gap between applications and infrastructure. It is a cloud-based service that provides a wide range of tools for the management and deployment of cloud-based applications. It enables developers to build and deploy applications while PaaS providers host the underlying hardware and software.

The need to reduce complexities of the cloud will fuel PaaS’s growth 

PaaS is witnessing a surge in demand with the increased adoption of digital infrastructure. Valued at $44 billion in 2020, the PaaS market is projected to grow at a 22% CAGR to reach $319 billion in the next 10 years, according to Allied Market Research. G2 has seen a 21% increase in reviews in the PaaS category in the last 12 months. 

With PaaS, developers can immediately tap into the provider's resources and start utilizing the resources. It also provides the flexibility to experiment with different languages and frameworks without any risk. These benefits reflect in G2 reviews, where 68% of reviewers say that they started receiving returns on their PaaS purchase within six months.

The segment is also attracting investor interest, with about half a dozen startups raising funds in the last two months.

Funding Raised by PaaS Startups from May 2022 to June 2022

The growth will be driven by the need to increase the efficiency of application development and reduce cost, complexities, and time to launch new products. But it will not be limited to application development tools. I believe the next focus areas will be on features like security, analytics, networking, and machine learning capabilities. As multi clouds become a norm, another area of focus will be to ensure that data can be shared seamlessly between different platforms to gather coherent insights.

Edited by Sinchana Mistry