Pantheon Systems, Inc. is a privately held San Francisco-based corporation founded in 2010. The company's flagship service, Pantheon, is a WebOps platform for websites powered by

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

and

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

CMS, as well as

NextJS Next.js is an open-source web development framework created by the private company Vercel providing React-based web applications with server-side rendering and static rendering. React documentation mentions Next.js among "Recommended Toolchai ...

and GatsbyJS Jamstack front-ends. It is an app-specific

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

provider. Technologically, Pantheon applications run as

software-as-a-service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike oth ...

instead of running on users' own servers. Pantheon's service is built on top of

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...

History

Founded in 2010, Pantheon Systems, Inc. raised a $1.3 million seed round to start. They subsequently raised $5 million

Series A A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

financing from Foundry Group, with previous investors being

Baseline Ventures Baseline Ventures is a venture capital investment firm that focuses on seed money, seed and growth-stage investments in technology companies. The company was the first seed investor in Instagram, an early investor of Twitter and has been called " ...

First Round Capital First Round Capital is a US-based venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan First Round typically provides seed-stage funding and focuses on po ...

, Floodgate, and Founders Collective bringing the total amount to $6.3 million. In 2014, Pantheon raised $21.5 million in

Series B A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the ...

financing led by

Scale Venture Partners Scale Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in Series A and Series B rounds. Scale has invested in over 380 Cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure companies over the past 20 years. Of these investments, 159 have resulted ...

(ScaleVP) with participation from OpenView Partners and existing investors Foundry Group and First Round Capital. As part of the funding round, Rory O'Driscoll, Partner at ScaleVP joined the board of directors. In 2016, Pantheon announced that it has raised a $29 million

Series C A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the p ...

round. Investors in this round include previous investors Foundry Group, OpenView Investment Partners, and Scale Venture Partners, as well as new investor Industry Ventures, which put $8.5 million into this round. The new round follows Pantheon’s $21.5 million Series B round in 2014 and brings the company’s total funding to $57 million. In 2019, Sageview Capital led a

Series D A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup company, startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture fundi ...

funding round of $40 million, bringing total funding to over $100 million. On July 13, 2021, WebOps platform Pantheon raises $100M from

SoftBank Vision Fund The SoftBank Vision Fund is a venture capital fund founded in 2017. It is managed by SoftBank Investment Advisers, a subsidiary of the SoftBank Group. With over $100 billion in capital, it is the world's largest technology-focused investment ...

. The $100 million Series E funding is at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Hosting of hate group websites

In April 2023, Pantheon was criticized by

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

developers for hosting the websites of organizations that have been designated as hate groups by the

Southern Poverty Law Center The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases against white ...

for their

anti-LGBT The following outline offers an overview and guide to topics about LGBTQ people. ''LGBTQ'' is an initialism that stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer". It may refer to anyone who is non-heterosexual, non-heteroroman ...

stances and their "ties to

white supremacist White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine ...

groups and

eugenicists Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the ferti ...

". Koenig confirmed in a statement that Pantheon would continue to host the organizations' websites. In an October 2023

open letter An open letter is a Letter (message), letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally. Open letters usually take the form of a letter (mess ...

, Koenig said, "we are marking new boundaries with a Prohibited Customers policy. We are setting standards that will, for instance, help us avoid taking on Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups as customers."

Features

Pantheon is a combination of web development tools in the

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

and

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web ho ...

and management services. It is based in the cloud, and is free until deployment. Developers have a choice between Drupal and WordPress and installation of profiles like Open Atrium, or custom upstreams with user-specified configuration. Data can be imported onto Pantheon automatically from existing Drupal-based websites. Its container-based architecture allows for multiple development environments of a single website.

History

Hosting of hate group websites

Features

References

External links