Portland funding gets cloudy and foggy: Madrona leads $1.8 million investment in PHP Fog

Yes, yes. I know I’m supposed to be all jazzed about the iPhone being available on the Verizon network now. And I am. That’s great news. But you know what has me more wound up? Funding. For a Portland company.

That’s right. Portland-based PHP Fog—a new startup that provides cloud-based hosting and dynamic scaling for PHP-based projects—has announced $1.8 million in funding, led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group.

Seattle’s Founders Co-op—an early stage investor who has also participated in rounds for Portland-based Urban Airship—also participated in the round.

What’s PHP Fog do, exactly?

PHP Fog provides simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there.

We handle deployment, failover, database maintenance, scaling, and all the other plumbing that can take an army of programmers and systems administrators to handle. Automatically. You pay only for what you use.

And it started out the way a lot of Portland startups get going. Mucking around with some code revealing an opportunity.

“I was hacking around with some code seeing if I could create something useful for my PHP programmer friends,” said Lucas Carlson, founder of PHP Fog. “I got a prototype working to prove that it’s possible. Then I put a landing page up that described the promise of PHP Fog. A single link on Hacker News went up the next day and 800 people signed up for what I built. That was the day I knew I had to go all in.”

So what about the classic “It’s difficult to get funded in Portland” cry?

“Being in Portland seemed to be a bit of a problem for funding at first,” said Lucas. “But when people saw the traction we were getting in the space, it did not matter.”

Which immediately leads to the question “Then why Portland?”

“The best thing about running a startup in Portland is the development talent,” said Lucas. “For cool and interesting projects, the kind of people you can get here are of the highest caliber. In terms of hiring talent, being in Portland has been a big asset. Portland’s programming talent is top notch.”

So there you go.

PHP Fog is currently in private beta.

For more on the deal, see coverage in TechCrunch, Mashable, and TechFlash.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy