Fastly, a large cloud service provider has announced the acquisition of Glitch, a quirky and capable web development environment. Fastly plans to expand the team and enable Glitch apps to use its edge computing capabilities, so Glitch will continue to exist within the company.
Fastly’s VP of developer experience, Anil Dash will manage Glitch and a new team focused on establishing a “library of tools and materials” to help people get started with Fastly’s products.
Glitch could have collected more money on its own, according to Dash, but he realized the company wouldn’t “remain independent forever.” He was mostly excited by Fastly’s edge computing solutions, he adds and thought Glitch could do a lot with them from the inside.
Dash says, “This edge platform that they’ve constructed is awesome as crap.” “It’s going to happen.” I’d like to be a part of it.”
Glitch was officially released in 2017, about the same time that Dash was appointed CEO of its parent firm, Fog Creek Software. The platform enables both novice and professional coders to easily build and deploy tiny web apps, with a “remix” tool that makes it simple to change someone else’s project and launch a customized version. Glitch has grown to 1.8 million monthly users and established a subscription service for pro and team features in the years thereafter.
The company was confident enough in the service to raise $30 million in funding in 2018 and change its name from Fog Creek to Glitch. For years, the company, which was created in 2000, had served as an incubator for projects that would later be spun out into larger organizations, with famous names like Trello and Stack Overflow tracing their roots back to it.
“You never need to graduate because you run on our underlying platform powering some of the greatest sites in the world,” explains Fastly co-founder Simon Wistow, “because you run on our underlying platform powering some of the biggest sites in the world.”
The purchase price was not disclosed by the companies. The entire Glitch team of 14 will be transferred to Fastly. This, however, means the end of Glitch’s union, which made history last year by signing the first collective bargaining agreement in the white-collar IT field. Employees will be moved to the new organization, and the union will be dissolved.
