Laravel raises a $57 million Series A

The big news of the day is that Laravel announced they raised a series A of $57 million from Accel. As someone who has been in the ecosystem from the very early days, I find the news both wild and amazing. I always knew Laravel was special, but Taylor's vision is where it really shines. From the beginning, it’s always been his “baby,” so to speak. He still merges PRs, looks over issues, has his pulse on new developers coming in, and tries to address their pain points as he sees them. I'm not sure many framework authors are as involved as he is, especially after running the project for over a decade.

I did get in early and created the site Laravel News with the goal of keeping the community informed. I always assumed Taylor was busy with the core and had no time to blog or write about what was going on. So, this was an easy gap for me to fill, and I'm so glad I decided to start that site. It's led me to friends all over the world and been successful enough that I've been able to go full-time running it.

Laravel News is independent of Laravel Inc., so I don't get any direct benefits from this funding announcement, but it will benefit everyone. More decision-makers will see Laravel as a serious company, and more dollars should come into the ecosystem to help PHP grow.

Of course, with the announcement, the money is primarily designed for new commercial products like Laravel Cloud and a new monitoring app he hinted at, but this gives more resources for the open-source side of the company and should help with getting more cool tools for us developers to use. The first is the VS Code extension in the works, which will help bring in new users who are already comfortable with that editor.

Today marks the next step for Laravel and it's so exciting. I'm super pumped for Taylor and the entire Laravel team!