Laravel (the company) has been selling services for ages. They had forge for hosting for years. That cloud thing seems to be their next iteration. They also had other things to sell (somewhere the lambos need to come from).

Personally I see $57M in funding as an expectation to make more than that money back in profits from those products – profits likely generated from laravel users given it’s laravel cloud. That’s fine if you get what you pay for to a reasonable degree – but that’s plain business as anywhere else. In this case it just happens to be that the company getting funded is owned by the lead developer of the framework. There might be the potential that this funding helps fund work on laravel itself, but primarily that money is meant to make more money from selling products I’d imagine.

Personally I prefer the route Dashbit is taking, where there’s no huge sums of VC money involved and the Dashbit team still seems to be doing well, funding their open source work with their payed for services.

I think @LostKobrakai’s original point really needs to be emphasized. They raised $57m to build Laravel Cloud. A better equivalent in Elixir would be something like Gigalixir. “Phoenix” would never get a multi million dollar Series A round, but something like “Phoenix Cloud” theoretically could.

Another thing worth pointing out is that there are folks like @chrismccord and myself who are paid by companies invested in the Elixir ecosystem to continue to push the ecosystem forward. If you factor in the salaries (proportionate to their OS work) of folks like that over the years, I’m confident that you’re well into the multiple millions of dollars range.

So businesses are investing in this ecosystem, because it ultimately makes their lives better. VCs will invest in something like Laravel Cloud because they believe they can make their investment back over time. I’m sure plenty of businesses invest money or time into Laravel as well, not throwing shade, just pointing out that asking “will Elixir ever go that route” is comparing apples to oranges.

Honestly, call me paranoid, but these kind of “raisings” seem like a huge scam to me.

What even a web framework needs so much money for? Will even a small portion of those money end up in the community where a lot of talented people made libraries and learning material unpaid in their free time?

Credibility? I suppose all the NFTs, 99.999% of which turned into hot air, were also credible then?

Buy-in due to “solid financial foundations” is also quite the scam and is something that’s being used even to this day, with startups making loud and grandiose claims just so they can pump up the price for which the next idio… sorry, acquisition company will buy them for.

Advocating from a position of popularity is bogus and always has been. Are you claiming that PHP, JS, Python are good languages? They still have global mutation and don’t even have good (if any!) concurrency and parallelism. How is that “good”?

Let’s not hide behind pretty phrases and be honest here. The moment others start paying your bills is the moment they get to tell you what to do, when to do it, and often even how to do it. You are now a dependent. You don’t make your own calls anymore.

I applaud any community that appreciates and holds onto its independence. Elixir’s is one of them.

Being independent meaning not losing sight of your goal, which is to shepherd the ecosystem where you want it – and people as benevolent as Elixir / Ecto / Phoenix maintainers have proven that they have the ecosystem’s best interests in mind.

When you get beholden to investors, you now protect their interests.

Media-driven fake popularity is a IMO a negative thing. “Exit velocity”? Exit to what? Elixir has an amazing track record of technical excellence and innovation. For me that’s what matters. If you want to be one with the herd, learn PHP.