I’m thrilled to announce that Elementor has closed a $15M round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the leading venture capital firms in the world (as published on TechCrunch). This is a special day for Elementor, our community and myself personally. Lightspeed’s funding expresses trust in the open-source ecosystem and in Elementor’s vision to empower professional web creators by radically simplifying web building, enabling web professionals to unleash their creative and business potential.

With Lightspeed’s backing, we plan to grow our operational capabilities and support our expanding community on the local and global levels. We intend to bolster our online training and learning programs, strengthen our infrastructures, and recruit more talent. At the same time, we will continue to develop new innovative product lines, thereby enhancing the Elementor platform.

As we move ahead to a bright future, it’s appropriate for us to look back at all that’s been accomplished and what motivated it in the first place. So, let’s take a look at Elementor’s origin story.

The Beginning

My partner Ariel and I set out to build Elementor in order to tackle the daily technical challenges and hardships we faced with each and every project while trying to run our own freelance website development and design agency.

From using custom code to spending hours on browser modifications, it seemed that being a profitable web development business was impossible. Necessity being the mother of all invention, we decided to create a better and more efficient working environment for web professionals, including ourselves!

Building Elementor on WordPress was the obvious choice for us. We had been active members (and fans) of the WordPress community, participated in forums, attended WordCamps, contributed code and developed several successful non-profit plugin projects. We believed our open-source project could find no better home than WordPress.

We ultimately released the first version of Elementor in June 2016, and within just 10 months we reached 100K active installs. Fast forward 4 years and Elementor is now powering over 5 million sites, has hundreds of thousands of active customers and more than 130K YouTube subscribers. Elementor is now the leading website builder on the WordPress repository, with a team that has grown to 130+ spread out around the globe. Dozens of new communities have formed around the world. We held 140 meetups across 6 continents last year, and 500 more meetups are planned for this year.

The overwhelming response made us realize that Elementor definitely wasn’t just a tool, it was a movement. We were improving the everyday professional lives of our users. Developers started releasing addons, designers created templates, young freelancers established their business using the platform. We had reached our goal and so much more.

The Vision Evolves: Birth of the Web Creator

Elementor has brought forth a new profession: the web creator. When Elementor helped reduce the technological frictions and restrictions of the past, it simultaneously opened new possibilities for professionals who can utilize its advantages. Now being a web creator is attainable.  Marketing teams can use Elementor’s pixel-perfect design capabilities to bring their landing pages to another level. Freelance designers can rely on marketing features like forms and popups and add another layer to their services. Developers can build upon the platform to create advanced solutions with less coding. Every professional finds a unique interpretation of how to make use of our all-in-one platform.

The Next Chapter

Now that we have backing, we are even more committed to our path. This backing is not just from the wonderful people at Lightspeed, but the support of countless plugin developers, community leaders, YouTubers, startups and most importantly Elementor users from around the world.

Using our resources, we will continue to actively develop our open-source community, which is our strongest driver of growth. While our team might be limited in the number of features we can deliver, 3rd party developers have helped produce hundreds of addons, and cheerfully answered any user request. In addition, 70% of all the features we develop come directly from our users’ feature requests. This produces a steady stream of innovative ideas and suggestions that drive the creativity of our platform.

Besides the emotional advantages of being part of a community and forming relationships, there is also a great advantage in gaining feedback and insights from others. Therefore, we are expanding our efforts to form local communities that come together in meetups. We are also proud sponsors of WordCamps and plan to continue to back events around the world.

It’s one thing to develop a platform, and another to get people to use it. This is why instructional content has always been a priority for us. Throughout Elementor’s short lifespan, our YouTube videos have been viewed over 20 million times. We see great importance in expanding our training efforts, giving aspiring web creators the right guides to get them started, while building advanced skills for more experienced professionals.

Exceeding Expectations

Back in 2016, when we just launched Elementor, we wrote an article explaining why we built our product. We drew a clear picture of what we were trying to achieve: to create a standard page builder with fast response time, live editing, intuitive UI, pixel perfect design and strong open-source principles. What we set forth to achieve was ambitious, and throughout the years we made sure to consistently live up to that promise. Now, with the additional funding we received, we have more means to deliver on that promise, and our drive has never been stronger. We see a very bright future for web creators, and we’re eager to continue working with each and every one of you to make your professional aspirations come to life.