Laravel has raised VC funding from Accel with a 57 M Series A. Here’s my thoughts on it, as cross-posted to HackerNews:

Congrats to the Laravel team, and Accel too! I feel they’ve got a winner on their hands.

Laravel has single handedly made PHP development cool again, and the way they did that was offering an integrated developer experience focused on ease of starting and quick productivity.

They flattened the learning curve of other “full” frameworks (like Django/Rails) by offering recommended (and official) tools and services out of the box. This cuts down a lot of the analysis paralysis faced by junior developers and they have an easy way to start adopting necessary complex tooling when it becomes relevant for them.

Have a look at the Ecosystem mentioned at https://laravel.com/ – Django doesn’t have an official local development GUI or Rails doesn’t have an official APM – which is a boon for power users that know how they want to setup their local development environment or what they want in an APM service, but they’re exhaustingly complex choices for a web developer just getting started.

I’ve observed Laravel gain a tremendous following with developers here in India, I believe because of this ease of getting started and being productive quickly.

I don’t even feel like the funding amount is ridiculous. For comparison, have a look at some of the funding raised by smaller frameworks/libraries (CMSes, “JAM Stack”, etc) without such an extensive set of revenue making services, in the JS world.

If they continue to pour the money on expanding their ecosystem while staying true to their value proposition to developers, they will do great. I, for one, am looking forward to this next generation of PHP/Laravel-powered web (maybe even mobile with this funding?) products.