The company plans to start offering a paid version with advanced features

Oct 12, 2011 14:02 GMT  ·  By

Nginx, the company behind the lightweight web server with the same name that powers a respectable share of the web, has raised $3 million, EUR2.2 million, in funding from a number of investors. The company had announced plans to expand into some commercial operations earlier this year and will use the funding to achieve that.

"Open source web server developer NGINX has received $3 million in a fully subscribed Series A round," the company said in a press release.

"Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet, and over 20% of the top 1000 busiest websites around the world, including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, LivingSocial, Hulu, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress," it added.

Nginx is quite well known by those looking for something lighter than Apache or Microsoft's offering. It has maintained a respectable slice of the market for a lot of time, but lately it seems to be seeing a rise in usage.

August was its biggest month and it continued to grow in September, according to some data. In fact, if the trend continues, Nginx should overtake Microsoft in October to become the second most popular web server around.

Investors are German BV Capital, Russia's Runa Capital and Michael Dell‘s venture fund MSD Capital.

Nginx, a Russian company, plans to expand to the US. While the bulk of the team, which is 5-people strong now, will remain there, but the company will set up offices in San Francisco sometime before the end of the year.

The plan is to continue to release the current offering under a BSD-like license, which ensures that anyone can use and modify it, but to start offering some more advanced features to paying customers only.

The first Nginx release was seven years ago and development has been able to continue so far without an external revenue source. But as its plans become more ambitious, Nginx creator decided to start building a commercial arm around the software.