Hamburg, Germany-based Jimdo, which offers cloud-based software to build your own website or online shop, has secured a €25 million ($28 million) minority investment from American growth equity firm Spectrum Equity.
You know it's an absolutely fantastic time to raise capital - especially if you can demonstrate significant traction - when companies that have stubbornly resisted taking outside investment for so long suddenly go for it (another case in point: see WeTransfer's story).
To wit, Jimdo only received a modest €500,000 investment when starting out in 2007, and has since grown to help people build many millions of websites without receiving any additional VC funding, said Jimdo CEO Matthias Henze in a recent interview with tech.eu.
In a blog post, Henze says the growth financing round that came after all will enable Jimdo to become "a stronger, faster, and more flexible company", and that its new investor specialises in backing "profitable, growth-stage companies with sustainable business models".
But the reality is that Jimdo accepted the investment simply because it can, and because the offer was probably so ridiculously favourable when it comes to deal terms and valuation that it would be straight-up idiotic for the three friends who co-founded the company to refuse it.
Henze acknowledges in the aforementioned blog post that Jimdo has declined to raise funding from other suitors in the past, and that it took four years of relationships with the folks over at Spectrum Equity to finally let them invest. For Spectrum, it's their first investment in Germany, although the American firm is clearly looking at Europe more closely lately (see its investment in Prezi, for instance).
Jimdo's story is even more remarkable because in 2008, only a year after it was founded, it already had a partial exit. German internet services giant United Internet acquired a 30% stake in Jimdo, only to see the company buy back its shares a year later.
Today, Jimdo is available in eight languages with some 200 staff working out of its offices in Hamburg, San Francisco, and Tokyo, and has enabled users to create over 15 million websites.
Also read:
How Jimdo built a profitable business on the cheap, and enabled the creation of 12 million+ websites
First impressions count: 10 EU-made tools to help design and build your website
(All images from Jimdo)
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