SensioLabs, the creator of PHP framework Symfony, has closed a $7 Million Series A in order to finance international growth, the startup announced today. Founded in 2005 by Fabien Potencier and Gregory Pascal, the company has come a long way since its founders first created the Symfony framework in 2005. Today, like most startups based on open source projects, the company operates a services business providing development support on Symfony to large clients like Orange, Saint Gobain, Drupal, Peugeot, Blablacar & more.
In addition to WordPress & Drupal, which make up respectively roughly 20% and 9% of the Internet today (both of which run on PHP), PHP makes up the vast majority of the Internet – roughly 70% according to Sensiolabs CEO Gregory Pascal. Known for being a pretty ‘immature’ programming language, Pascal sees Symfony’s role in the PHP ecosystem as that of a more ‘professional’ face of PHP.
Looking to Springsource (the company behind Spring, sold to VMWare) for inspiration, Pascal says the road ahead will be an exciting one. While the official announcement states that the company will be looking to ‘internationalize,’ the language & company itself remain completely international, with France making up less than 15% of the total market.
Given that the most common complaint about PHP has been that it is sloppy or child’s play, I think the guys at Sensiolabs have their work cut out for them. Adoption of Symfony has been by and large successful and well-received – while some complain about the massive jump from Symfony1 to Symfony2, which made it difficult for out-dated sites to keep up to date, this is likely just part of the growing pains that come with taking a junior-level programming language and building a senior-level framework on top of it