Koding, which is in the midst of rolling out its cloud-based environment for developers in public beta, has raised $2 million from Greycroft Partners and RTP Ventures (a U.S. investment firm associated with VC fund ru-Net).
Other backers include individual angel investors such as former Google exec Rich Chen, Media Temple CEO Demian Sellfors, Accel Partners’ former CTO-in-Residence, Bob Pasker, and Localresponse CEO Nihal Mehta.
Koding’s self-described mission is to “make software development easy and free” for “anybody in the world”, with an “open platform” that will remove “as many barriers as possible”. Quite the lofty goal if you ask me.
From the press release:
The development process can be a long and labor-intensive task for even the most experienced developer. The current process of developing and running Web applications is tedious and involves a number of prohibitive steps that include knowing what localhost is and dealing with its problems while trying to get simplest of app running, unzip it, ftp it back to your server, database configurations, user permissions, Web server settings, git setup, dealing with the hassles of hosting companies, and the costs of code editors.
Koding, formerly known as Kodingen, has built a development platform that aims to simplify all this by providing a quick, centralized place where devs can can access everything they need to complete an application development project, and code from anywhere on any device with a browser.
Interestingly, the tool also lets developers give new programming languages and platforms a whirl rapidly and with as little friction as possible, by essentially removing the need for setup and configuration of new tools.
Koding is preconfigured and automatically provisioned with a free development server that runs ruby, python, php, perl, & node.js. Development MySQL and MongoDB servers are provided free to all users.
Its community already boasts over 40,000 coders and is growing at a rate of 3000+ developer sign-ups per month, the San Francisco-based company claims.
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