Nginx, based in San Francisco CA, started in 2002 and has raised $13M in funding. They currently have 15 employees, with plans to grow to 50, by the end of 2014. Nginx develops open source web server & caching software, used by CDNs, and Internet giants, like Zynga, Facebook, Soundcloud, Dropbox, Groupon, Zappos, Hulu, and so on. Below are some stats from Netcraft, the authority of the web server and web hosting market share analysis niche.
Netcraft Feb 2014 Market Share Stats for Nginx
- Nginx powers 17.5% of the top million sites
- Nginx has 138M “Web Server Developers Market Share of All Sites” which equates to 15% market share; Apache has 351M developers and Microsoft has 301M developers
- Nginx has 14% of all websites found as of Jan 2014. In Feb 2014, there are 920M websites. If we take 14% of 920M websites, Nginx is used by 128.8M websites.
Prediction on Nginx
Lets summarize the above stats; Nginx is used by the top 175k of 1M websites, has 138M web server developers, and is used by 128M total websites, give or take a few million. Although it does take a rocket scientist to develop caching software, it doesn’t take one to figure this out, this company is headed into the big time valuation in 5 years.
What Red Hat is to Linux, Nginx is to web server software. They are a billion dollar company right now in the making. It’s interesting that many haven’t figured it out yet.
Why else would they only get $15M in funding. I predict Nginx will get $50M in the next round of funding. With only 15 employees on staff, it’s only a matter of weeks, before CDN personal from all walks of life start banging on Nginx door for employment. They are so small right now, that there’s still enough time, to get in the door, get stock options, and become millionaires in a few years. In 5 years, Nginx is going to be bigger than all CDNs, except Akamai, with billions of dollars in market cap, when they are a public company, right next to Aryaka Networks.