Ionic is a cross platform mobile app development framework that helps Android developers (+iOS and Web) easily create apps. The platform was first launched in 2013 and constantly grew to the point where now is helping millions of devs create their apps.

The good new is that recently they’ve raised $6M in funding to keep them growing even more. This financing will help them continue to make the Ionic Framework and their entire commercial offering better and build for the long term. If some devs were not too keen to jump aboard and use a young framework, this new funding helps improve Ionic’s reputation and definitely draw more devs towards it.

An interesting thing is that Ionic’s business was doing very well before the financing too, and in fact the CEO mentioned that “the business is in a strong financial situation today, and did not depend on raising more financing. In fact, we decided last year to reject the grow-at-all costs VC mentality to instead build a strong, sustainable, and enduring business, because we know that is what our community and customers deserve. Despite this, Ionic continues to grow quickly (over 100% YoY growth), and is nearly profitable and operating in a responsible way. I’m incredibly proud of that.”

For those that never heard about Ionic, here’s a glimpse on what it is and offers:

  • it’s an HTML5 mobile app development framework targeted at building hybrid mobile apps (i.e. small websites running in a browser shell in an app that have access to the native platform layer)
  • it’s a front-end UI framework that handles all of the look and feel and UI interactions the app needs
  • Ionic comes with very native-styled mobile UI elements and layouts that you’d get with a native SDK on iOS or Android but didn’t really exist before on the web
  • Ionic needs a native wrapper like Cordova or PhoneGap in order to run as a native app
  • it’s multi-platform, meaning you can create Android apps, iOS, Windows 10 or even web apps with it.
  • it’s commercial, with prices starting at $42/month depending on which tier you choose. The entry tier can be used only for apps that have 10,000 or less.

So congrats to Ionic for this milestone, I’m sure they’ll keep increasing their market share in the mobile app development world.