Zesty.io, a San Diego Web development firm, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding to spin out its consulting business, and focus instead on providing its core Web content management technology as a subscription-based software-as-a-service.
CEO Randy Apuzzo said Zesty changed from a Web development firm to to SaaS in 2015, with the guidance of successful entrepreneurs like GoFundMe co-founder Andy Ballester, Rocket League video game creator Dave Hagewood, and Facebook early operations engineer Taner Halicioglu. All three are San Diego angel investors, and together provided most of the seed financing round, Apuzzo said.
The company, which now has nine full-time employees, advanced its content management system so that it is globally distributed and cloud-based, Apuzzo said. Zesty now targets enterprise and mid-market companies with its automated Web services.
The company has grown “to the point where we can now raise our Series A round,” Apuzzo said.
Apuzzo acknowledged that the market for Zesty’s services is crowded with competition, including Boston-based Acquia, Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ADBE]]), and Sausalito, CA-based Sitecore (acquired last year by the Swedish investment firm EQT).
“We’re the new kids on the block,” Apuzzo said. “We’re also in one of the oldest markets on the Web. It’s technology that’s 14 years old, and that’s in Web time, and we’re going to disrupt it.”
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.
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