Codeanywhere, one of a number of startups offering a service pitched as ‘a Google Docs equivalent for developers’, has raised $600,000 in funding from World Wide Web Hosting, LLC, the parent company of Site5 Web Hosting.
The startup offers a browser-based environment for coding in HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and XML, with a built-in FTP client and Dropbox support for storing files.
Codeanywhere faces competition from the likes of Cloud9 IDE and ShiftEdit. However, co-founder Ivan Burazin says that Codeanywhere’s strength is in its simplicity. “You can think of us as an application that lets you code on any resource you have, whereas Cloud9 wishes to be a platform (on which) for you to code.”
Ben Welch-Bolen of World Wide Web Hosting adds, “(Codeanywhere) focused on providing a simple tool that has a lot more mass market appeal whereas their competitors have started at the top of the market with too much complexity.”
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Croatia-based Codeanywhere, which was known as PHPanywhere until 2011, will use the funds to improve scalability, acquire more users (the company currently boasts 150,000), and develop new features such as collaboration tools and native mobile apps. That said, Codeanywhere already supports mobile devices, albeit only as a Web app.
As for why a Web hosting firm invested in a browser-based coding startup, Welch-Bolen explains, “There is a race inside the hosting industry to make it easier to go from a development work environment to production with one click. For our hosting brands it made sense to work with Codeanywhere and try and find a solution that allows one click publishing of projects to a hosting platform.”
Header image credit: Thinkstock
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