An Mx3 commercial partner, 2024 has been a breakthrough year for Flexpress with the SaaS enterprise raising $10M of VC funds, the hiring of new CEO Ajay Rayasam, as well as significant client successes that build upon an already impressive roster.
For immediate release August 27, 2024 (Austin, Texas): Flexpress, which provides superior infrastructure for high-traffic websites to increase revenue, grow audience, and reduce engineering overhead more than 20%, today announced the hiring of SaaS industry veteran and entrepreneur Ajay Rayasam as CEO, $10 million total funds raised, multiple new customer wins, and several exciting new product features.
At present, the Flexpress DXP platform — AI-enabled, fully-hosted, and decoupled (aka “headless”) CMS with integrated monetization and analytics — improves speed and performance for more than 75 web domains, and processes more than 500 million web requests per month. Customers include Flyingmag.com, Saveur.com, FieldAndStream.com, TopClassActions.com, and Forksoverknives.com, with hundreds more domains in Flexpress’s onboarding queue.
The Flexpress team has raised to date $10 million of investment capital to service their demand, from a syndicate of expert investors including: BDev Ventures (founded and launched in late 2021 by Nacho De Marco and Paul Azorin, the founding team behind BairesDev), Endurance Companies (founded by Alex Tonelli, founder of Funding Circle), Momchil Filev (Founder & CEO of BestReviews.com, which sold for $160 million in 2020), Joe Goldberg (current Vanta and ex-Splunk, VMWare and Snowflake), Kihara Kiare (former CFO of Bloomberg Media), Michael Rempell (former COO of American Eagle), Matt Liu and Josh Fraser (founders of Origin Protocol), Ryan Schmukler (founder of Urbint), Andrew Blachman (Managing Partner, Marketplace Capital), Alex Ford (founder of Praetorian Digital, sold to Lexipol), Matthew Sechrest (Managing Director, North Equity) and Nate Robert and Andrew Berberick (founders of Baton.io, sold to Ryder).
High Traffic Websites
High-traffic website owners choose to use Flexpress because they want to focus more on higher-value activities related to audience growth, content development, and UI/UX design, versus spending so much time and resources managing fragmented SaaS solutions, rote engineering, and spreadsheet analysis/paralysis. For high-traffic website owners, the benefits of moving off legacy infrastructure onto Flexpress include:
- Increase site speed 10X-20X due to independently-operating frontend and backend
- Grow monthly audience 20% via improved search, syndication, and recirculation
- Grow monthly revenue 20% via technically-superior ads, commerce links, and subscription pages
- Eliminate technical debt with one platform integrating hosting, cms, monetization, and analytics
- Decrease site redesign investment by 50% with Flexpress’s schema-enabled, web design library
- Receive best-in-class service via direct access to expert web engineering knowhow and talent
- Unilaterally improve critical site performance metrics predictive of improved user experience, search rank, and ad revenue, including CLS Scores, Lighthouse Scores, and Core Web Vitals
Initially founded as Organic.ly, Flexpress encapsulates the company’s commitment to flexibility at scale, open-source innovation, and utilizing AI to maximize audience and revenue potential for customers. Under Rayasam’s leadership, the Flexpress team will focus on building and growing Flexpress’s DXP platform for its rapidly expanding customer base.
“My passion for building companies and teams comes from my experience serving as an early-stage hire that went on to see rocket-ship-type growth at firms like Dell, Rackspace, Oracle, and Upwork,” commented Rayasam. “Thinking about where those companies were, versus where we are today at Flexpress — I honestly could not possibly be more excited about the opportunity in front of us. A larger-than-you-think majority of the Internet’s highest-trafficked sites have been constructed on legacy, fragmented technology that results in a myriad of issues, namely painfully-slow site speed, irrelevant advertising, high bounce rates, and glitchy user experiences. Website owners facing these challenges will be overjoyed to work with Flexpress, especially as we can save them lots of money and time that they’re currently wasting on technical debt, legacy engineering, and fragmented infrastructure.”
Flexpress’s formula for value starts with upgrading WordPress to a decoupled, or “headless” configuration, using all open source code — which massively improves site speed and user experience. Instead of pages (with ads) loading in 3-7 seconds, they load in less than 300 milliseconds (i.e. 10X-23X faster) as Flexpress unifies the fragmented SaaS provider ecosystem into one platform. High-traffic website owners manage a familiar, lightning-fast CMS that comes pre-integrated with multiple monetization tools, including API connections into Big Tech (e.g., Hubspot, Klayvio, Google Analytics), rather than managing countless plugins and stressing about site security and uptime.
Rob Verger, long-time Technology Editor at publications including Popular Science, Fast Company, and Popular Mechanics had this to say: “Flexpress is the best CMS that I’ve ever seen — it feels stable, and it’s intuitive and quick, which is critical when I need to get a story up as quickly as possible.”
Artificial Intelligence
Flexpress also uses AI in a way that appeals to investors and customers alike. Instead of forcing large language models to create content (or replace editorial jobs with sub-standard prose), Flexpress has deployed AI as a curator that can provide personalized content serving to individual site visitors. For example, using Flexpress technology, Top Class Actions increased monthly revenue by 18% — with all users receiving a personalized ads experience according to their specific browsing behavior.
Said Colin Groves, Vice President of Investments at BDev Ventures, “There’s currently a lot of sub-standard AI being marketed to VCs and angels, which for all of us gets to be a bit of a slog. Flexpress, however, has integrated AI into its platform operations in a smart, sensible way that ensures website owners benefit from, rather than clash with, the technology that ‘AI’ now encompasses.“
Rayasam’s second priority as CEO is continuing to expand the Flexpress developer and partner ecosystem in order to continue serving the company’s rapidly-growing customer base. Flexpress’s customer growth comes from another one of the company’s innovations: lightning-fast and efficient migrations off legacy infrastructure. Unlike other providers who would charge $30K-$50K per site and require 18-24 months to unify a portfolio of 20+ sites under one platform, Flexpress could accommodate this same work in 6 months at a fraction of the cost. Under the hood, these benefits come from a first-party data migrator tool and web-schema enabled React/Next.js frontend design library, as well as Flexpress’s tight network of talented digital strategists and engineers, including Digiboost, Refact, First + Third, Proxet, Good Wolf Studios, Omeda, Twenty-First Digital, and RankStudy. Denis Stebenov, CEO of Ivelum, shared this video update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg5vZj-NlyY
Commented Rayasam, “Think of Flexpress like high-grade plumbing for your most expensive (digital) real estate assets. Our expertise and passion is ensuring asset owners have the permanent piece of mind that the water pipes infrastructure interconnecting all their toilets, sinks, wash basins, fountains, laundry, etc. will always work, and work well. Better yet, if anything ever happens, experts ready to handle everything on your behalf are a text flick away.”
To learn more, please connect with Flexpress by emailing: hello@flexpress.ai, or visit our website flexpress.ai. We’re excited to work toward providing more value for the Internet’s high-traffic sites, and the millions of visitors interacting with these brands daily.
About Flexpress
Flexpress provides one SaaS platform for high-traffic websites to grow audience, revenue, and reduce engineering costs. Customers such as Flyingmag.com, Saveur.com, FieldAndStream.com, Forksoverknives.com, and TopClassActions.com rely on Flexpress for lightning fast site speed, and A+ site performance. Backed by BDev Ventures, North Equity, Craft Ventures Scout Fund, and Endurance Companies, Flexpress processes hundreds of millions of monthly pageviews for its customers, resulting in millions of dollars in earned revenue for high-traffic site owners.
Flexpress Website: https://flexpressai.com/
Enterprise Headless CMS overview: flexpress.ai/cms
Partner video testimonial from Denis Stebenov, CEO of Ivelum
