[Funding alert] Global developer blogging community Hashnode raises $2.1M led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge

Founded in June 2020, global developer blogging community Hashnode has raised $2.1 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. Started by Syed Fazle Rahman and Sandeep Panda, Hashnode is a blogging platform that helps developers and teams start blogs and share them with the broader developer community.

The funding saw participation from a range of marquee investors including Naval Ravikant (early investor in Twitter, Uber and Co-founder of AngelList), Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal (Founders of BrowserStack), Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur (Founders at Razorpay), Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal (BrowserStack), Christopher Golda (BlackType, acquired by Twitter), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Salil Deshpande (Uncorrelated Ventures), and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel).

In a span of six months, the platform says it has seen a growth rate of 25 percent month-on-month. More than 20,000 new developer blogs have been created on the platform since its inception and over 500,000 readers visit the platform every month. 

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Syed Fazle Rahman, CEO at Hashnode, commented:

“We realised many writers just want a platform that helps them focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without losing control over their content or thinking about traffic and SEO. Hashnode allows developers and businesses to create a blog on a custom domain and stay connected with a central community for content distribution. This solves both the problem of content ownership and distribution.”

Currently, there are two types of blogging solutions. Publishing networks (like Medium) help a blogger with social media credibility and reach, but at the cost of content ownership and customisation. There are self-hosting solutions like WordPress, but distributing the content is difficult, which makes it hard to create large and active communities. The cost of running the software also keeps increasing. 

Hashnode says it helps writers focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without the risk of compromising their content or losing control of the traffic and SEO.

“Hashnode allows developers and businesses that want to build developer communities to create a blog on a custom domain and stay connected with a central dev community for content distribution. The platform also allows publishing articles directly from Github, a feature not available on other publishing tools,” added Fazle

Surge is Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up programme for startups in India and Southeast Asia. Surge combines $1 million to $2 million of seed capital with company-building workshops, a global curriculum and support from a community of exceptional mentors and founders. The programme’s goal is to supercharge early-stage startups and give founders an advantage.