Elementor, a WordPress plug-in for website creation, made its first acquisition today. Elementor is paying millions of dollars to acquire Strattic, a Jerusalem-based business that develops technologies to improve the response time and security of WordPress websites.
Separately, “Globes” has uncovered that Elementor raised an extra $50 million in cash last year, which was previously unknown. The round was an internal one from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the principal investor in Elementor. This is in addition to the $16 million raised earlier by Elementor.
WordPress site builder Elementor buys Strattic in all-Israeli deal https://t.co/QrlSVzXL9T
— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) June 8, 2022
CEO Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein established Elementor in 2015. The business has created a professional design plug-in for the free, open-source website content management system WordPress. According to a W3Techs report, WordPress is used to administer 43 percent of the top ten million websites, and Elementor is one of its most popular plug-ins.
The original Elementor product is a plug-in that costs $49 per year for the basic version (there is also a free version). A few months ago, the business released Elementor Cloud Website, a $99-per-year bundle that combines the plug-in with website cloud hosting. The market for Elementor is made up of Internet creators, which includes website building businesses and freelancers, as well as professionals such as wedding photographers who develop websites for themselves. The firm employs around 400 workers.
Strattic, the purchased firm, was launched in 2016 by CEO Miriam Schwab and COO Josh Lawrence. Zeev Suraski, one of the PHP programming language’s creators, serves as the company’s CTO. Elementor will hire sixteen workers from the firm. Strattic raised $6.5 million in a seed round but is reportedly being acquired for less.
Yoni Luksenberg, who serves the role of CEO at Elementor, had the following to say:
If you’re a large company, you can’t afford for your product to be heavy, and that’s a problem that large companies have that build websites using WordPress. Companies have to employ a team of Devops people to ensure that the website loads quickly. We want to preserve the Strattic brand and use it to break into new markets, such as larger companies.
Elementor intends to offer Strattic’s product, which turns WordPress sites into sites based on JAMstack architecture, separately and to use its marketing operation to promote it. The product reduces the number of calls to the website’s database and makes the site more secure.
