dotCMS receives new growth investment to modernize digital experiences
Oct 26, 2021
dotCMS, a leading content management system, today announced a growth investment from a private investor group led by Pacific Lake Partners and the appointment of Zain Ishaq as Chief Executive Officer and Vadym Kononenko as President. Working alongside dotCMS founders Will Ezell and Jason Smith and the new investor group, Kononenko and Ishaq will lead dotCMS through its next growth journey.
dotCMS was founded in 2009 and over the past 13 years has been focused on building the best open-source content management system for delivering modern digital experiences across websites, mobile apps, and connected devices. With new leadership and partnership with investors, the company will accelerate its product vision to become the leading SaaS hybrid Digital Experience Platform.
“We see a great opportunity in the marketplace to build an open-source Digital Experience Platform loved by both marketers and developers. dotCMS has built an incredible platform over the last decade, evidenced by the trust of leading brands as its customers. We look forward to continuing to expand our offerings while staying true to our roots in staying engaged with our growing open source community”, said Ishaq. “We are honored to have the opportunity to lead dotCMS through its next phase of growth. This transaction will help accelerate dotCMS’ vision of DXP while focusing on outstanding support and services for its clients globally”, said Kononenko.
“In bringing on the new investors, along with Zain and Vadym, we are doubling down on accelerating our product vision”, said Will Ezell, dotCMS’ CTO.
Our core product is both mature and agile, delivering value to digital teams with surprisingly little effort. With the new investment and leadership, dotCMS is poised to disrupt the world of legacy Digital Experience Platforms that are prohibitively expensive to own and complex to implement.
“We’ve worked with dotCMS to build web and mobile applications for some of our most esteemed brands over the past four years”, said Billy Fisher, Partner at Willowtree, one of the leading digital agencies in the industry. “dotCMS has always been a great partner and we look forward to seeing what dotCMS can achieve with the new investment and the additional leadership team.”
In addition to the growth investment and additions to its leadership team, dotCMS added three independent board members, Tom Wentworth, Ben Ruedlinger, and Trevor Lwin.
Wentworth is the chief marketing officer at Recorded Future. He brings nearly 20 years of experience in the digital experience platforms market, having served as the chief marketing officer of Acquia and Optimizely.
Ben Ruedlinger is the Chief Innovation Officer at Wistia. Over the past 14 years, Ben has helped Wistia develop industry leading video capabilities used by hundreds of thousands of companies. Prior to that, Ben founded a company in the Web 2.0 space that was acquired by a venture funded company where he served as CTO.
Trevor Lwin is the ex-CEO and current Board Member of T-Base Communications, a leader in accessible communication solutions for enterprises.
About Pacific Lake Partners
Pacific Lake is an experienced and well-resourced investor dedicated to partnering with search fund entrepreneurs. Pacific Lake partners with talented entrepreneurs to find and acquire great companies and grow them. As a long-term partner for the entire search fund journey, Pacific Lake’s purpose is to help entrepreneurs buy a great business and succeed as a CEO. Pacific Lake offers support for entrepreneurs, including searcher workshops and a range of post-acquisition initiatives conducted by its Value Creation Team. For more information, visit http://www.pacificlake.com.
About dotCMS
dotCMS is a content management system that helps global enterprises with multiple brands, subsidiaries, and franchises manage, optimize, and scale content across languages and channels. Brands such as Dairy Queen, Newell, Firstmac, Telus, and Comcast have chosen dotCMS for its unique ability to manage thousands of sites and consolidate multiple CMSs onto a single, unified instance of dotCMS to streamline content management across teams while saving money on platform costs.
dotCMS’ universal approach to content management also means that companies have the choice to deliver content traditionally or headlessly. Headless developers can work within the front-end framework of choice while still providing marketers with visual editing tools so they can go to market with their business-critical content and decrease their dependency on technical teams.
