On Tuesday, a professional website builder from the State of Israel that caters to SaaS corporations and digital agencies, Duda, announced that it has successfully raised funds of $50 million. Its Series D financing round was mainly led by a new investor, Claridge IL. Existing investors also participated enthusiastically, such as Vintage Investment Partners and Susquehanna Growth Equity. The announcement further added that $10 million of the funds raised will go towards purchasing shares from the employees and founders of the company.
This financing round is the largest to have been carried about by Duda up until now. It has brought the total revenue raised by the company to $100 million. One of the first investors of the company is Oren Ze’ev, which previously led the Seed round, as well as the Series A. Pitango is another early investor, whose board consists of Chemi Peres, the son of Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister.
Duda is well-known for coming up with a leading platform for website development, which caters specifically to professionals who create websites for small business customers. However, as opposed to Wix, the tools created by this Israeli website builder can only be used by professionals.
Itai Sadan, the CEO of Duda, further added that back in 2014, the company made several significant changes. Consequently, the company was revamped and restarted. He informed that it had originally revolved around the development of mobile phones but, within five years, expanded towards becoming a platform for professionals, to assist small businesses in building websites.
According to the CEO, the work that the company does is no different than what Wix does. In addition, it has around a million websites on its platform, which were all developed using Duda’s white-label platform.
Sadan also noted that the website developer’s unique selling point comes from the fact that it focuses specifically on professionals. He maintained that the market for website building is quite large and therefore, there are various needs that companies, such as Wix and WordPress are unable to meet. In his words, this is where Dadu comes in with its website builder and distinct features.
The CEO asserted that the Israeli professional website developer has some large clients and that it also serves tech companies looking to integrate their platforms with a website builder, as well as SaaS clients.
Amir Glatt and Sadan founded Duda, back in the year 2010. As of now, 180 people are in the company’s employment, out of which 90 are in Tel Aviv. The rest are working in Brazil, London, Colorado, and Palo Alto. Sadan revealed that the Israeli company is looking to hire at least 100 more employees over the course of the upcoming year. He added that most of these will be recruited to assist in the development of the product, whereas the rest will be taken on board to help the sales and marketing department.