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WordPress cloud service provider Sova raises $3M, launches freemium hosting plan

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.18

See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore. Why so confident? Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors: Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20. Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region…

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore.

Why so confident?

Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors:

Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20.

Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region because we’ve seen no competitors focused on such a niche space.

Adding multilingual options

Many of their users come from Japan and the Southeast Asian regions. To address a latency issue for them, the company’s cloud facilities are located in Singapore and Osaka, Japan. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to set up another facility in Palo Alto to prepare for their expansion to the US market and also add user support offices in Palo Alto and Indonesia to the existing locations in Singapore and Osaka. Fujimoto explained:

Since WordPress accounts for over 20% of all websites in the world, everyone knows how it’s sure to monetize. We’re still as young as six months old, but we’ve been receiving many takeover offers from companies like telcos in Asia and Silicon Valley-based companies expecting expansions to the Asian markets. But we have no intention to accept their offers for now.

Sova is also in talk with a undisclosed Japanese hosting company to provide a white label service for their customers. So you’ll be able to see a WordPress cloud hosting service branded with a major Japanese company pretty soon. The service is currently available in English and Japanese, but plan to add Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish to its language options next month.

Launching freemium hosting plan

Earlier this week, the company started accepting applications for their freemium hosting plan called Sova WP Free. Now that they’ve got the funds and a measurable number of paying users, so they thought it’s good to launch the premium plan to gain their awareness amongst potential customers. Fujimoto added:

It’s a freemium service but has a feature to boost the capacity of your environment to withstand up to 1 million daily page views. We’re developing our own ad network platform, which will enables blog owners using our service to monetize their content. It’s also available for mobile browsing. Typical WordPress templates are limited in its variety of design, but we will provide many templates using responsive designs and give users more choices.

We understand that they are trying to secure a series A funding worth an amount ranging from $10 to $15 million by the end of October.

I was curious about how Fujimoto have been working prior to this business. He told me that he started his own business while he was attending Kyoto University. Subsequently he launched an IT business and sold it over to a big Japanese IT company back in 2009. He’s busy flying back and forth between Singapore and Palo Alto for setting up their first office in the US.

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In conversation with WordPress.com parent Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.11

See the original story in Japanese. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore. After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained: We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am. When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005…

See the original story in Japanese.

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore.

After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained:

We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am.

When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005 or 2006. He added:

If you compare the state of the community to a baseball game, it’s still one inning. So we want to more penetrate WordPress in Japan. That’s why we want to hire good people from Japan. That’s one of biggest reasons why I visited Japan this time.

Among their 250-person team, about one-third of them are committed to user support while the rest of them are engineers, designers and administration staff. ‘Working from everywhere’ is certainly one of their uniquenesses, so only 15 people are working in their headquarters in San Francisco. They have no Japanese employee other than Naoko Takano, their ‘globalizer‘ personnel based in Tokyo.

English would be one of obstacles when typical Japanese people work with them. However, Matt told us with laughter that “You will need to read English but no need to speak in English.” (since internal communication in his company is entirely web-based.) It is obvious that Matt is eager to hire more people from Japan to better serve the local WordPress community comprising of more than a few WordPress users.

Our readers may recall Automattic raised 160 million dollars from VC firms. In a response to my question that he has no intention to let his company go IPO or be acquired by a big company, he explained:

We raised a larger amount of money than typical IPOs. We want to control our company by ourselves and have no need of an IPO for now. WordPress became eleven years old two months ago. The money raised this time is to prepare for our next ten years.

We understand that the company plans to use the funds to intensify system developments, especially for mobile optimization for iPhone and Android handsets. In a view of that, his intention hiring Japanese engineers is quite natural since Japan is more advanced in mobile than any western countries.

It is told that websites using WordPress as their platform account for over 20% in all sites in the world. With a limited number of 250 employees, they have generated such a big traffic share larger than that from internet giants like Facebook and Google. It will be interesting to see how their future employees from Japan and the rest of the world will bring WordPress beyond a blogging environment or a content management system to an entirely new concept.

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PressSync Pro: A handy way to connect to WordPress on the go

Rick Martin 2013.06.04

Recently I wrote a little about my favorite mobile writing apps, one of which was Poster, a beautifully designed iOS app that interfaces quite nicely with WordPress blogs. But there’s a similar app made here in Japan that almost made my list. PressSync Pro, while not as pretty as Poster is every bit as powerful, maybe more so. PressSync lets you do practically everything you can normally do with WordPress, with menu items to browse published articles, drafts, local articles, and media/images [1]. You can even edit things like the URL slug, the post’s featured image, and custom fields. PressSync does not access your entire archive of articles, but just the most recent ones. But you can adjust the setting to increase or decrease how many posts deep you’d like to dig into your archive if you wish. By default the font size in the PressSync editor is a little small, so you might want to bump it up a notch – and you can do so in the settings. There is snippet support for common HTML tags, and even Markdown. While this is handy, to me it requires a few to many button presses, and I will likely continue…

Recently I wrote a little about my favorite mobile writing apps, one of which was Poster, a beautifully designed iOS app that interfaces quite nicely with WordPress blogs. But there’s a similar app made here in Japan that almost made my list. PressSync Pro, while not as pretty as Poster is every bit as powerful, maybe more so.

PressSync lets you do practically everything you can normally do with WordPress, with menu items to browse published articles, drafts, local articles, and media/images [1]. You can even edit things like the URL slug, the post’s featured image, and custom fields. PressSync does not access your entire archive of articles, but just the most recent ones. But you can adjust the setting to increase or decrease how many posts deep you’d like to dig into your archive if you wish.

By default the font size in the PressSync editor is a little small, so you might want to bump it up a notch – and you can do so in the settings.

There is snippet support for common HTML tags, and even Markdown. While this is handy, to me it requires a few to many button presses, and I will likely continue to compose in another app, and maybe use an app like this one to publish. PressSync also has an AppLink maker function for bloggers who need to create affiliate links.

Overall I think it’s a pretty great app, and for anyone who needs to interface with WordPress on a mobile, its certainly worth the 450 yen ($4.99) price tag. You can get it over on the App Store.

I do have one complaint about tag input, which presents tag selection by listing all your tags (which can tag a while if you have many) with on/off sliders. Tags would be better input by simple writing them out separated by commas , I think. ↩

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