ATLANTA-BASED WEBSITE BUILDER MAKESWIFT SCORES $1.5M EQUITY RAISE
Atlanta-based website building company Makeswift has raised
$1.5 million in equity in its most recent funding round. Pat Matthews, founder
and CEO of Active Capital, led the round, with participation from 10 other
investors.
The four-year-old company, formerly known as Landing Lion,
had previously raised $500,000 in a “founder’s round” of funding before joining
the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) last year. The company plans
to use the funding to facilitate the transition between Landing Lion and
Makeswift.
“We have been heads-down in 2019 gathering feedback from an
early set of Makeswift customers to fuel product development while
simultaneously continuing to support thousands of Landing Lion users,” says
Makeswift co-founder and CEO Alan Pledger. “We are preparing a transition path
for those customers to Makeswift in early 2020. These funds will give us the
runway we need to continue to support Landing Lion customers through this
transition and get Makeswift to market.”
Landing Lion set itself apart from other website builders
like WordPress with an intuitive interface that let you drag and drop page
elements without the need for coding. The company’s automatic SEO optimization
feature also gave it an advantage over most traditional landing page platforms.
However, the introduction of Makeswift streamlines and strengthens Landing
Lion’s existing technology.
The technology that powers Makeswift is a much more powerful
and focused version of the Landing Lion tech,” says Pledger. “As a complete
rewrite, we decided to drop the features that were holding us back from chasing
the vision of an open component marketplace sourced by 3rd party developers.”
“In order to scale with unknown challenges of a growing
business, a website has to be extensible, and that’s what we’ve focused on:
Providing robust APIs for developers to integrate React components for their
non-technical counterparts to use. A new way for teams to work together.”
Makeswift’s no-code website building capability also helps
users hampered by similar builders with overly limited or complex options.
“While there are plenty of no-code website builders in the
market, they are all either too limiting or overly complex,” Pledger says.
“Makeswift is designed to give our customers the ability to quickly get started
building highly custom websites from scratch.”
Many of the company’s customers have previously used tools
like WordPress to build their marketing sites, which would require bringing on
a developer to truly customize them. Makeswift also allows their customers to
learn the core concepts required to design a custom site without code in
minutes by going through the Makeswift Handbook.
“Our customers have told us that they have been able to
learn Makeswift much faster than other tools, not to mention the savings on
outsourced development that comes along with custom WordPress sites,” says
Pledger.
After the success of this most recent round, Makeswift has
no further plans to pursue additional funding at this time. Makeswift is
currently invite-only, but the company’s popular Founding Makers program,
launched in 2018, offered early customers a chance to access Makeswift at a
locked-in discount. “Since closing out phase 1 of the Founding Makers program
we’ve been building a waitlist, which currently has more than 1,100 members,” says
Pledger.
Several of the company’s initial clients are Fortune 500
companies that have launched their sites via Makeswift, and this raise caps off
a year Makeswift has used to learn and perfect their product. “A handful of our
Founding Makers [have] provided us with valuable feedback in the process,” says
Pledger.
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