Why Susquehanna Growth Equity Is Going $25M Deep Into Duda's Site Building Technology

In the crowded website builder market, Palo Alto-based Duda recently announced a $25M investment by Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE).

The market already has plenty of popular drag-and-drop website builders for SMBs, including those from GoDaddy Inc GDDY and Wix.Com LTD WIX. What made Duda stand out to SGE’s investors is their committed focus on serving the agency customer. Instead of growing by one SMB at a time, Duda is leveraging their white label agency platform to help digital agencies and web developers to design and deploy more sites at a time, for more SMB clients, than they can with other platforms.

Duda’s platform dramatically cuts the time it takes for our digital agency customers to create beautiful, effective websites for their customers without compromising on design,” Duda co-founder and CEO Itai Sadan told Benzinga via email. “This is a top-town investment in the SMB sector.

Noa Wolfson, an investor at SGE, notes that the firm was initially impressed with the speed and ease of the product, but it wasn’t until they started speaking with some of Duda’s agency and SaaS customers that they realized the company’s growth potential.

“Time and again, customers told us that Duda catalyzed the growth of their agencies,” Wolfson said in a statement upon joining Duda’s Board of Directors. “The ability to have all site building and client management needs on a centralized, and more importantly, secure, platform saves web professionals time and money.”

This round of financing brings Duda’s total to $50M, and Sadan is banking it all on their B2B product. In 2015, he made the decision to stop going after individual SMBs and refocus Duda’s energies to become the go-to website builder for agencies and other companies that serve the SMB market. This decision became the basis for solid growth since then; their estimated 6,000 agency and SaaS customers have used Duda’s white label solution to publish more than 560,000 websites for SMB customers.

The VC ecosystem loves the recurring model revenue of SaaS, and it tends to flow toward innovative tech with growth potential. Duda offers both in one package, with agency and SaaS customers that guarantee repeat sales, and SaaS-based technical innovation with headless web design capabilities which eliminate many of the challenges agencies and hosting platforms face when creating websites at scale.

Duda notes their agency clients see a time saving of 50% or more compared to building a site on WordPress or other legacy-style, self-hosted platforms that aren’t built with optimized team workflows in mind.

Used by leading hosting companies like Telstra, 1&1 Ionos and 123 Reg, the easy flow of Duda’s API-powered, self-service solution allows end users to start at their host’s website and seamlessly use Duda’s tools. This allows users to start building a website, without the need for service providers to enable any type of access for them.

It’s all integrated through a robust API that can push and pull the end user’s content and data in a frictionless and secure environment.

Duda has already partnered with some of the biggest digital players in the industry. They serve all types of customers, from freelance web professionals and digital agencies, to the largest hosting companies, SaaS platforms and online publishers in the world.

The Palo Alto company will use this round of investment to accelerate sales and marketing push, and to grow its Israel-based R&D team.

Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay