Ionic in TechCrunch, and Beta Coming Soon!

Today we are super excited to announce we’ve closed $1M in funding from Arthur Ventures, and were featured in a great TechCrunch writeup.

With this funding, we are going to focus on making Ionic the best mobile development framework in town, starting with dramatically improving the stability, documentation, and feature set of the framework, and improving our Android and Windows Phone support.

Since we launched the Ionic alpha at the end of November 2013, we’ve been blown away by your passion and excitement for the project. Today, over 200 new Ionic apps are started every day, and we are delighted by all of the high quality apps the community is making.

Speaking of community, we are so thankful to have a great and growing one. The forum has seen so much activity in the last month that we had to hire someone just to keep up with it! We hosted our first Meet and Drink a few weeks ago in San Francisco, and had over 30 passionate Ionic developers show up, even though we set it up at the last possible moment.

We’ve also seen a lot of people presenting Ionic around the world. To help with that, we recently created a reusable Ionic slide deck, and we hope to see lots of forks and customizations on this over time.

Since we launched, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about how we plan to make money with Ionic. To be upfront: we will never charge for the framework. The market just doesn’t need another proprietary framework, and we want as many developers to be able to use Ionic as possible.

Instead, we are building out useful backend services and tools for developers using Ionic that integrate incredibly well into the framework. These services will not be required to use the framework, just a nice to have if you are building and deploying a complex mobile app. See our past products for an indication of what we might do here.

With the funding, we are looking to double the size of our team of 9. If you are a great developer that wants to hack on open source, or help build out some of our upcoming backend services, please get in touch (or read about our open positions)! We are looking to grow the team in Madison, but we are open to remote work for the right person.

We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for Ionic in 2014, including the upcoming Beta release of the framework. Stay tuned for more info on the beta next week!

Thanks so much for your support and passion!

<3 The Ionic Team