The Grid Has Over 11,900 Founding Members as AME Cloud Ventures Leads $4.6 Million Funding Round

The Grid, a content platform that wants to be the list software to meet “today’s real time, anywhere” web site creation demands packaged with cool design has raised $4.6 million in a Series A round led by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. This follows a $3.1 million seed round and an incredibly successful self-crowdfunding campaign launched a few months back.

In a note to founding members, the Grid Bear shared;

A little under two months ago, our team huddled around a single monitor in the living room of the house we rented for launch week, waiting for the counter on thegrid.io to tick up.

And then it happened. Our first Founding Member joined.

And another, and another, and another…

The initial crowdfunding goal of raising $70,000 was easily smashed in the first 24 hours. As of earlier this week the number of Founding Members, those who backed the campaign, numbered over 11,900 indicating a total amount to date of over $1.14 million.  Of course these new apostles are being recruited to aid in spreading the good word.  Grid reports that almost $20,000 in referral credits have been paid out to Founding Members.  The expected launch is in early 2015.  While the crowdfunding round raised far less than the seed and A round – the word of mouth advocacy of Founding Members is pretty priceless.

The Grid was founded by a group of well known developers including former Google Adsense Director of Products Brian Axe, first Medium designer Leigh Taylor, and CEO Dan Tocchini.

Tocchini stated this past October;

“Building a website that actually looks awesome is still a pain in the ass. Template making platforms take hours, if not days to make something you’d be proud of .. We’ve spent the last few years building a form of artificial intelligence that functions like your own personal graphic designer, able to think about your brand and present it in the best way possible. The design adapts to your content, not the other way around.”

And that is where Grid comes in.

Seed stage investors include; Elegant Themes founder Nick Roach, former Facebook VP Greg Badros, former Disney exec John Pleasants and SF Giants pitcher Noah Lowry.  This group of backers, along with the new investment should give the Grid team plenty of power to successfully launch next Spring.