Sequoia’s Surge leads $2.1 Mn round in Hashnode

Developer blogging community Hashnode has raised $2.1 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. 

A range of marquee investors also participated including Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList; Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, founders of BrowserStack; as well as Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, founders at Razorpay. 

Hashnode was one of 17 startups selected in the fourth cohort of Sequoia Capital’s accelerator program Surge.

“We realised many writers just want a platform that helps them focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without losing control over their content or thinking about traffic and SEO...,” said Syed Fazle Rahman, CEO of Hashnode in a press statement.

According to Rahman, the platform also allows publishing articles directly from Github, a feature not available on other publishing tools.

 Floated in June 2020 by Rahman and Sandeep Panda, Hashnode is a free content creation platform and community that allows people to publish articles on their own domain and helps them stay connected with a growing developer community. 

The company claims to have been growing at a rate of 25% month-on-month.  So far, the platform has over 20,000 active blogs with 500,000 monthly active users or MAU.

Besides Hashnode, LambdaTest, Let’s Dive, Kyt, Plum, PagarBook, Shipsy, Richpanel, Kutumb and a healthtech startup operating under Alpha Digital have also raised funds in 2020. All these startups are part of Surge fourth cohort.

Entrackr had exclusively reported the funding rounds in Surge 04’s two stealth mode startups in November and December.

Among the selected 17 startups in Surge 04, a dozen of them have operations in India which include Hashnode, LambdaTest, Let’s Dive, Kyt, Plum, PagarBook, Shipsy, Richpanel, Studyroom, Kutumb, Alpha Digital’s healthtech app and a sales engagement SaaS platform which is in stealth mode.