---
title: 'Blast from the past: Versionista is still around and landing big deals'
date: '2023-01-06T09:01:25-08:00'
type: post
word_count: 276
char_count: 1735
tokens: 359
categories:
  - Oregon
  - Portland
  - Startups
tags:
  - 'malia spencer'
  - 'portland business journal'
  - Versionista
---

# 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](https://versionista.com/).

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](https://archive.org/web/) meets Github.

Anyway, [I first wrote about the company more than a decade ago](https://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/28/versionista-track-changes-for-any-web-page-wiki-highlight-style/). And then I kind of lost track of their progress. Thankfully, [Malia Spencer at the Portland Business Journal didn’t](https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/inno/stories/profiles/2023/01/05/beaverton-software-fox-and-geese-fathom.html) — 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.