I'm not just a PHP developer, I'm also a serial-entrepreneur. 15 years ago, I co-founded Sensio, a French web agency that eventually created Symfony, a PHP web framework. Last year, we decided to split the company to create SensioLabs, a company dedicated to PHP and Symfony.

And today, I'm really excited to announce that SensioLabs just raised 5 million euros (about 7 million dollars) to boost Symfony and its ecosystem.

Fund raising in the PHP world does not happen that often, and that makes me sad. Of course, PHP has big players like Automattic, Acquia, or Zend, but the PHP world has so many great solutions, great products, and a large community of very talented developers. They deserve more exposure and I hope that our fund raising is one small step into that direction.

What does it change for Symfony itself? Symfony is licensed under a very permissive license (MIT), and this will never change; we have no plans to provide a freemium version of the framework and anyway, I think it would not make any sense.

So, what is SensioLabs going to do with the money? First, we want to move the Symfony ecosystem to next level. I started Symfony 7 years ago to help companies improve their usage of PHP, and to give them a framework that implements some of the best practices needed to develop solid web applications. Now comes the time to improve the ecosystem around Symfony: bundles (more than 2,200 bundles now), applications based on Symfony (e-commerce, CRMs, CMSes, ...), and products improving the Symfony development experience. It's key for Symfony and we want to help community initiatives in this area the best we can.

Besides helping the Symfony Open-Source community, SensioLabs will also be able to hire more talented developers (we plan to hire about 60 people in the coming year). We will also extend our services internationally, and focus on providing great SaaS products (like the upcoming SensioLabsInsight). In one sentence: we want to improve the current PHP toolset.

That's a very exciting news for me and the whole SensioLabs team. Thank you for your support and expect more exciting news in the near future.

More information on the SensioLabs website.