Tom Preston-Werner home

Announcing RedwoodJS 1.0 and $1M Funding

4 Apr 2022 - Bay Area, CA

Three years ago, I had an idea for a new web app framework. Two years ago, we released RedwoodJS v0.1 to the world. Today, more than 300 talented individuals have lent their ideas and time in crafting our documentation, design, community, marketing, and code. During the journey, we found our mission: to help more startups explore more territory, more quickly.

Over the last six months alone, startups using RedwoodJS have raised over $19M USD in funding. They are the brave, early adopters that helped shape what Redwood has become. Now it’s time to serve everyone. As of this moment, we fully endorse Redwood for production use across a wide range of applications, from simple solo side projects to funded startups.

To celebrate this milestone, I have two big announcements for you.

#1 - Today, we release RedwoodJS 1.0.

As with all things that start with the number one, this is the first major version of many to come. There is so much more that we can do to help startups bring their multi-client apps to fruition. That is our guiding star. To reach our goals, we need to accelerate. Which brings me to the second announcement.

#2 - Today, I am committing $1,000,000 to RedwoodJS development over the next year.

In the past, we’ve talked about whether we should turn RedwoodJS into a company and raise money for it. We certainly could; other players in the space have done so. But we always ask ourselves if that’s what would best serve the Redwood community. When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.

Right now, we prefer a third choice: build a sustainable open source project that evolves and grows naturally, without artificial growth hormones. For a difficult-to-directly-monetize framework project like Redwood, it will take us time to find the right model of sustainability that aligns with the community. That’s hard to do without some money, though.

Fortunately, I find myself in a position to solve this problem in an unusual way. I love open source. I love working on RedwoodJS. I love bootstrapping. So my million dollar spend on Redwood development comes with no strings attached, except that we continue to focus on building the best app framework for startups.

I hope you enjoy the Redwood 1.0 release as much as we do. We will be celebrating all week with events centered on developers, founders, partners, and more, all culminating in another big announcement on Thursday, April 7th. RSVP now to get reminders!

If you want to learn more, skim through the newly updated Redwood Website and spend some time doing the comprehensive Redwood Tutorial.

I hope to see you in the community!

Continue the conversation on the RedwoodJS Discourse Forum.