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Blast from the past: Versionista is still around and landing big deals

It’s always nice to read about companies that make you reminisce. For me, it’s usually along the lines of “Oh. I remember when somebody tried to do that before.” or “It’s nice to see that founder working on something new.” Ah, nostalgia.

But there’s also another — far more rare instance — where a company from way back suddenly pops up on the proverbial radar again. Which is what happened this week with Versionista.

Versionista, in my terms not their’s, is like a version control for the Web, where you can easily see when and what changes were made to a site. So kind of like the Wayback Machine meets Github.

Anyway, I first wrote about the company more than a decade ago. And then I kind of lost track of their progress. Thankfully, Malia Spencer at the Portland Business Journal didn’t — because they just landed a $1 million Department of Defense contract.

It didn’t really gain traction with journalists. But, what did happen over the course of the last 15 years is a slew of new regulations companies must follow. And big corporate enterprises started using the product to monitor regulatory agency sites, said Bray. So, in 2017 he left a digital products gig at Starbucks and refocused on building Versionista and other similar products. 

So if you’ve been working a side project longer than you would have liked, perhaps this can serve as some wind in your sails.