As a Google Partner with Fresh Capital, Zesty.io Aims to Disrupt CMS

Zesty.io team 2018 (Zesty.io image used with permission)

After establishing a partnership with the Google Cloud Platform, Zesty.io CEO Gerry Widmer said Wednesday the San Diego-based company is expanding its workforce and extending its Web content management system (WCMS) to international customers.

The three-year-old company already provides its content management system on a software-as-a-service basis (SaaS) for such customers as Sony, Acorns.com, and Rocket League, said Widmer, who took over as CEO from Zesty.io founder Randy Apuzzo at the end of 2017. (Apuzzo shifted to his preferred role as CTO.)

Zesty also added $1.5 million at the end of last year in a seed round led by the boutique private equity firm ClearVision Equity Partners. With $1.3 million in previous funding, the additional capital brings Zesty.io’s total  to about $2.8 million since 2015, Widmer said. As a result, Zesty has been hiring. “We’re 13 going on 20 by the end of June,” Widmer said.

While there are scores of content management systems for Web-based publishing, Widmer said Zesty is the first SaaS-based CMS to be listed as an official partner on the Google Cloud Platform. “They’re investing in us, and we’re investing in them,” Widmer said. The collaboration enables Zesty.io to set its sights on joining the upper ranks of legacy WCMS providers like Drupal, Sitecore, and Contentful, Widmer said.

Zesty.io CEO Gerry Widmer (Zesty.io image used with permission)
Zesty.io CEO Gerry Widmer (Zesty.io image used with permission)

In a blog earlier this year, Widmer argued that many legacy CMS providers have failed to keep up with next-generation SaaS-based providers like Zesty.io. To compensate, Widmer wrote, “legacy platforms have essentially tried to put their software in the cloud. These cloud-washed options are not true SaaS solutions but rather a pretty Band-Aid applied to disguise the fact that they are struggling to stay relevant.”

Through its work with the Google Cloud Platform team over the past year, Widmer said Zesty has advanced its proprietary software “to the point where it is really solid. It’s enterprise grade now.

“We’re going against the big guys from an enterprise perspective,” Widmer said. “We’re really providing [our customers’] marketing teams with a better experience for updating their content, and a better experience for developers, so they don’t have to spend as much time [working] on their websites.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.