[January 29, 2019] |
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WP Engine Announces $132M in Annual Recurring Revenue
WP
Engine, the WordPress Digital Experience Platform, today announced
it has passed annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $132 million, as well as
grown to serve more than 90,000 customers globally while improving upon
its world-class NPS score to 86. Since January 2018, WP Engine's Agency
Partner Program (APP) has enjoyed 84% growth and its global employee
count is up 37%. The company also continued to build out its WordPress
Digital Experience Platform with key technologies and earned numerous
honors throughout the year, including multiple workplace of choice and
leadership awards.
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is a market leader in one of the fastest
growing segments of the Web, providing digital solutions for companies
of all sizes to build, manage and deliver compelling digital
experiences. The company's Digital Experience Platform is the leading
software and services solution for websites developed on the WordPress
content management system, the preeminent open source software for
website creation that powers approximately 33% of the Web,
up from 13% in 2010. Today, WP Engine powers more WordPress websites
among the one million most trafficked websites on the Internet than all
other managed WordPress hosts combined.*
"We are both humbled and honored to experience this type of stellar
employee, customer and business growth," said Heather Brunner,
Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer of WP Engine. "However, it's the
fact that we did so while improving both our customer NPS score and
securing several international best places to work accolades that made
2018 a truly incredible year. I am excited about the opportunities ahead
for us and the WordPress community in 2019."
In January 2018, WP Engine secured $250M in funding from Silver Lake. At
that time it outlined how the strategic growth investment would inject
further momentum into four strategic priorities:
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Accelerate innovation on its Digital Experience Platform
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Ramp investment in the success of its Agency Partner Program
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Fuel future growth internationally, particularly in EMEA, Australia
and New Zealand, and further raise brand awareness
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Double down as a workplace of choice - investing in WP Engine's people
and culture who help power the company's customer success
Sales and Customer Growth
WP Engine has now passed $132 million in ARR while growing its customer
base 20% from a year ago. Regionally, from this time a year ago,
customers grew by 23% in the U.S., 21% in Australia/New Zealand and 11%
in Europe. Some of the brands that began leveraging the WP Engine
digital experience platform over the past year include Klarna,
Microsoft, the NBA, News Corp., RetailMeNot and Thomson Reuters (News - Alert).
Positive customer experiences are a leading indicator of customer
growth. WP Engine's award-winning Customer Experience team continued to
deliver outstanding outcomes for our customers by improving upon its NPS
score and achieving a score of 86; further reinforcing the company's
heritage as a world-class provider of customer support.
This past year, the company announced the promotions of David Brolsma to
Chief Financial Officer and Tina Dobie to Chief Customer Officer.
Brolsma and Chad Costello, General Counsel were also new appointments to
WP Engine's executive team.
Digital Experience Leadership
In 2018, WP Engine acquired StudioPress,
creators of the Genesis Framework, the world's most popular theme
framework for millions of WordPress websites. The acquisition
underscored WP Engine's commitment to and investment in the WordPress
open source community and further strengthened its platform, allowing
designers faster time-to-market, a path to Gutenberg, the new editor in
WordPress 5.0, and far greater ease and agility building digital
experiences.
WP Engine also added Array's
themes and the associated Atomic Blocks to its growing list of
digital solutions. Atomic Blocks is the most popular and most downloaded
library of beautiful, responsive and customizable blocks for Gutenberg
allowing users to add great-looking elements to their web pages at
significantly reduced turnaround times that convert at higher rates, all
without touching a line of code.
With cybersecurity a top boardroom imperative for companies of all
sizes, WP Engine launched Global
Edge Security, the world's first complete perimeter security
solution for WordPress, built from Cloudflare's Internet performance and
security solution. WP Engine customers and WordPress site owners benefit
from business operations protection, customer data security, improved
app and server availability, protection from WordPress-specific
vulnerabilities and emerging threats, and reduction of network latency
and congestion for a greatly enhanced, more consistent digital
experience.
THE WordPress Partner of Choice
Launched in 2017, WP Engine's Agency
Partner Program enables agencies of all sizes to use WordPress to
grow their business by driving creative, engaging experiences that
deliver clear impact for their clients. Since its launch, the APP has
grown exponentially, enrolling over 2,250 agency partners thanks to the
availability of extensive thought leadership and content resources, its
digital experience platform, advanced developer tools and the
opportunity for new business leads. New agencies to the program, signing
up within the last 12 months, include: Edelman, Grey, Huge, The Richards
Group and W2O Group.
WP Engine expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) by
launching the Amazon
Polly plugin, which transforms text into lifelike speech, and the
integration of Amazon Translate into the Amazon Polly plugin translating
English content into any of 26 languages. These tools allow publishers
to turn written content into podcasts to reach even more consumers, such
as those on the go and the visually impaired.
Workplace of Choice Growth and Recognition
WP Engine grew its reputation as a workplace of choice again last year.
The company increased its employee base 37% across its six offices,
which now numbers over 600 total employees. The team's international
employee base grew 83% in Europe and 60% in Australia/New Zealand. 67%
of WP Engine's C-suite are women, 29% of the non-executive managers are
women, 29% of its employee base are non-white and nearly a third are
non-degreed. The company received 17 industry and individual accolades
since January last year, including Fortune's Great Places To Work for Technology
#8, Millennials
#61 and Small
and Medium Workplaces #14; Excellence
in Wellbeing Programme from Great Places To Work UK; and International
Business Awards ("Stevies") for Customer Experience and Marketing
Executive of the Year.
WP Engine consistently reaches these levels of recognition because it
remains true to its five core company values. One of them, "Aspiring to
lead and committed to give back," motivated WP Engine employees to give
generously of their personal time and money in 2018, totaling over
$61,000 and 1,380 hours to improve the communities where they live and
work by focusing on health, hunger and education initiatives.
About WP Engine
WP Engine is the WordPress Digital Experience Platform that gives
companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence, and
integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP
Engine's combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of
WordPress experts are trusted by over 90,000 companies across 140
countries to provide counsel and support, helping brands create
world-class digital experiences. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is
headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco,
California; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; Limerick, Ireland and
Brisbane, Australia.
*Based on WP Engine research identifying the Web Content Management
systems' digital fingerprints for the most visited 1,000,000 sites as
identified by Alexa. The fingerprints can sometimes be found inside the
HTML and in other cases, they are located in the HTTP headers.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190129005337/en/
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