WP Engine, a WordPress managed service provider (MSP), has secured a massive investment from Silver Lake in the form of $250 million to be used to fuel international growth and push innovation.
WP Engine also announced it reached more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue with over 75,000 customers globally, up 30 percent year-over-year.
Silver Lake’s Managing Partner Greg Mondre and Managing Directors Mark Gillett and Lee Wittlinger will join WP Engine’s Board of Directors as part of the transaction.
WP Engine's Core Services
The company’s tentpole offering is its Digital Experience Platform, which provides hosting services and software solutions for sites built on WordPress’ open source content management system (CMS).
“WP Engine’s enterprise-grade technology and excellent service enable its customers to rapidly create high-quality websites with best-in-class performance,” Wittlinger said in a written statement. “We believe WP Engine is poised to take a leading global position in the fast-growing WordPress ecosystem and we look forward to working alongside the company’s talented management team as it executes on its next phase of development.”
The WordPress CMS largely dominates the website building world as it powers about 29 percent of the internet, up from 13 percent in 2010 when WP Engine opened its doors. WP Engine now boasts 435 employees around the globe and the company says it now powers more WordPress websites than all other managed WordPress hosts combined. (Disclosure: ChannelE2E and sister site MSSP Alert run on WP Engine.)
Silver Lake’s Tech Investment Plays
This is just the latest in a number of big moves from Silver Lake, a major global technology investor. Notably, it bought up SolarWinds and its N-Able MSP Software business for $4.5 billion at the end of 2015.
More recently, the investment firm advised GoDaddy on its purchase of Host Europe Group. It also sold off its Vantage Data Centers to Digital Bridge for more than $1 billion early last year.
