Weebly History

What is Weebly? | About Weebly

Weebly is a web hosting service, headquartered in San Francisco. Its parent company is Square, Inc. On acquisition in April 2018, Weebly had quite 625,000 paid subscribers.

Weebly was founded in 2006 by Chief Executive Officer David Rusenko, Chief Technology Officer Chris Fanini, and former Chief Product Officer Dan Veltri. Rusenko and Fanini both attended the school of data Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) while Veltri attended the university's Smeal College of Business. At the time, Penn State required all students to take care of an online portfolio, in order that they built upon this concept and created software that made it easy for anyone to build a personal website.

The formal development of Weebly began in January 2006. The invitational beta release was announced in June 2006.[5] The official private-beta launched in September 2006.

Weebly was selected for Y Combinator’s winter startup program, in January 2007.

In 2008 Weebly added "Pro" accounts and Google AdSense monetization features, as well as compatibility with Google Chrome and Safari.

During Weebly's initial startup years, Weebly received criticism for its lack of CSS/HTML editing support, and in 2009 added this functionality. In 2010, the company added French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese languages.

In April 2014, Weebly raised $35 million in Series C funding from Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Rusenko stated in August 2013 that the company signed a lease for a 36,000 square feet (3,300 m2) warehouse in San Francisco, based on an expectation of ongoing growth. The new office will house the bulk of a worldwide team of 600 employees in 2014 when it moves into the property. As of August 25, 2013, Weebly had 80 employees and was based in an 11,000 square feet (1,000 m2) space within the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco.

In October 2015, Weebly announced it would open a Berlin office in late 2015/early 2016 to offer European-based support and marketing.[citation needed] In April 2016, Weebly integrated JotForm software on its services. On October 1, 2015, Weebly Carbon was released to permit plugin integration among other features.

In 2016, Weebly began to focus in on its eCommerce offerings with the discharge of Weebly 4 and Weebly Promote, an integrated marketing tool.

As more sellers began using the company, the company created features for one-click taxes, integrations with Shippo to streamline the shipping process, Facebook Ad creator, integrated email marketing and lead capture, abandoned cart features, the release of Mobile 5.0 to help sellers run their store from anywhere and deep integrations with Square payment processing.

In early 2018, co-founder Dan Veltri left the company to pursue other interests. In January 2018, Weebly hired its first VP of Brand, Alexis Contos, and she hires marked the first time the 12 people executive team was 50% women and 50% men.

On April 26, 2018, Square announced it would acquire Weebly for approximately $365 million in cash and stock.