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A website is an important first impression. But for startups, it’s often an expensive and time-intensive process that can make or break a young company.
But what if you could shorten the development process to a single day?
Readz, a Woodland Hills-based content creator, emerged from stealth last week and simultaneously announced a $7.15 million round in funding.
The company specializes in microsites, landing pages, and other content to help boost marketing efforts with their production kit.
Readz CEO Bart De Pelsmaeker began creating the product in 2011 as an easy-to-use web development tool for the online publishing market. But feedback began pouring in from brands hoping to utilize the tool for marketing purposes, convincing Bart and his team to take the product in a different direction.
“The feedback reflected a need for brands to be able to create content online rapidly next to their existing content management systems,” De Pelsmaeker said. “We thought they would just do it on their CMS, but they described those as more lengthy procedures that didn’t offer the flexibility they were looking for. With Readz, we see people get online within a week but if you have your content ready, and it's simple, you can be online in a day.”
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The “no-coding” development tool offers a collaborative workspace for multiple projects with an integrated analytics dashboard directly on the editor. The user can toggle between desktop, tablet, and mobile layouts to simultaneously create an aesthetically pleasing site that functions on all three devices. De Pelsmaeker believes they have capitalized on an untapped middle-ground between the large complicated CMS systems and the small limited systems like SquareSpace.
The company currently employs 16 people in the Woodland Hills office, and says a portion of the $7.15 million will be used to build out their sales and marketing teams. Capital will also be used to develop new features to aid designers. The funding round began in 2011 and was led by Parana Management Corp.
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