Marquee tech investors join Hashnode US$2.1m funding round, led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge

2026-07-20 06:31:52 Business

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Bengaluru, 15th December 2020: Global developer blogging community Hashnode, today announced it has raised US$2.1m in funding, led by Sequoia Capital India?s Surge. A range of marquee investors* also participated including Naval Ravikant (early investor in Twitter, Uber and co-founder of AngelList), Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal (founders of BrowserStack) as well as Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur (founders at Razorpay).

Founded just 6 months ago in June 2020 by Sandeep Panda and Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode helps developers and engineering teams start technical blogs and share them with the broader developer community. The platform is growing at a rate of 25% month-on-month. More than 20,000 new developer blogs have been created on the platform in a few months and over 500,000 readers visit https://hashnode.com every month.

Developer blogs are the heart of many developer communities that share, learn, and drive innovation around specific products, projects, hacks, and code branches. The rapid growth of the API economy, which is underpinning the tech sector's growth, has been fuelled by these developer communities.

Currently, there are two types of blogging solutions. Publishing networks (like Medium) help a blogger with social media credibility and reach at the cost of content ownership and customization. There are self-hosting solutions, like WordPress, but distributing the content is difficult, which makes it hard to create large, active communities. The cost of running the software also keeps increasing. Hashnode helps writers focus on writing and gives them the freedom to blog without the risk of losing their content or losing control of traffic and SEO.

Syed Fazle Rahman, CEO at Hashnode commented: ?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. Hashnode allows developers and businesses to create a blog on a custom domain and stay connected with a central community for content distribution. This solves both the problem of content ownership and distribution.?

Hashnode powered blogs are easy to use, set up, configure, highly optimised for SEO, and have built-in community interaction functionalities like reactions, comments, bookmarks, and more.

?Hashnode allows developers and businesses that want to build developer communities to create a blog on a custom domain and stay connected with a central dev community for content distribution. The platform also allows publishing articles directly from Github, a feature not available on other publishing tools,? added Fazle

Sandeep and Fazle are avid developers, bloggers and authors who have both published several books on various web technologies. They graduated together from IIIT Bhubaneswar in Computer Science Engineering and have a shared passion for building products for the web and teaching developers online.

*Angel investors in the round include: Naval Ravikant (AngelList, Uber, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Yammer), Ed Roman (Pluralsight and Hack Summit), Shashank Kumar (Razorpay), Harshil Mathur (Razorpay), Ritesh Arora (BrowserStack), Nakul Aggarwal (BrowserStack), Christopher Golda (BlackType, acquired by Twitter), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Salil Deshpande Uncorrelated Ventures) and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel).

About Hashnode

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.

About Surge

Surge is Sequoia Capital India?s rapid scale-up program for startups in India and Southeast Asia. Surge combines $1 million to $2 million of seed capital with company-building workshops, a global curriculum and support from a community of exceptional mentors and founders. The program?s goal is to supercharge early-stage startups and give founders an unfair advantage, right out of the gate.