Flexpress customers including Flyingmag.com, Saveur.com, FieldAndStream.com, TopClassActions.com, and Forksoverknives.com use Flexpress’s lightning-fast, AI-enabled, and hosted CMS to grow audience, increase revenue, and reduce engineering costs 20%+.
Flexpress CEO Ajay Rayasam
For immediate release August 28, 2024 (Austin, Texas): Flexpress, which provides superior infrastructure for high-traffic websites to increase revenue, grow audience, and reduce engineering costs 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.
Flexpress’s DXP platform offers high-traffic site owners an AI-enabled, fully-hosted, and decoupled (aka “headless”) CMS with integrated monetization and analytics. At present, Flexpress drives blazing-fast speed and A+ 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.
To service the demand, the Flexpress team has raised $10 million of investment capital to date 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 website owners choose to use Flexpress because they want to focus on higher-value activities such as 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
- Reduce site redesign effort 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 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 money and time that they’re currently wasting on technical debt and legacy engineering.”
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) due to Flexpress unifying 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). Using Flexpress, website owners can effectively eliminate stress related to managing countless plugins, site security, and uptime, and focus instead on higher-value activities.
Rob Verger, Technology Editor at publications including Popular Science, Fast Company, and Popular Mechanics added: “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.”
Flexpress also uses AI in a way that appeals to investors and customers alike. Instead of adapting large language models to create content (aka 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 18%+ due to 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.“
Another of Rayasam’s priorities as CEO is continuing to expand the Flexpress developer and partner ecosystem in order to serve the company’s rapidly-growing customer base. Flexpress’s ability to fuel its customers’ growth comes from another one of the company’s innovations: lightning-fast, efficient migrations off legacy infrastructure onto Flexpress.
Unlike other providers who charge $30K-$50K per site and require 18-24 months to unify a portfolio of 20+ sites under one platform, Flexpress can accommodate this same work in less than 6 months at a fraction of the cost per site. Under the hood, these benefits come from a first-party data migrator tool Flexpress developed, as well as a web-schema enabled React/Next.js frontend design library. Furthermore, Flexpress integrates into a tight network of talented engineering horsepower including Digiboost, Refact, First + Third, Proxet, Good Wolf Studios, Omeda, Twenty-First Digital, and RankStudy. Denis Stebenov, CEO of Flexpress engineering partner Ivelum, shared this video update.
Commented Rayasam with a wry smile, “Think of Flexpress like high-grade plumbing for your most expensive (digital) real estate. 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 extremely well. Better yet, if anything does ever happen, technical experts ready to handle everything for you are a text flick away.”
To learn more about Flexpress, please connect with us 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, increase revenue, and reduce engineering overhead. Customers such as Flyingmag.com, Saveur.com, FieldAndStream.com, Forksoverknives.com, and TopClassActions.com rely on Flexpress for blazing-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.
