Netlify, a cloud computing company, has recently announced the acquisition of Quirrel, an open-source service provider, to adopt and execute serverless functions.

Ever since Quirrel was founded by Simon Knott, the company has not been successful in generating outside funds prior to the acquisition, which took place silently in mid-2021 following the introduction of one of Netlify’s investors.

Surprisingly, Netlify has come a long way from explaining the concept of Jamstack a few years ago to now standing in a highly competitive environment against similar service providers like Vercel.

It has raised significant amount of funding, allowing Netlify to acquire entities and therefore boost overall growth along with product expansion.

Reportedly, Vercel was acquired with a promising $150 million Series D round in November, following the $102 million gained in Series C round held in June.

These consecutive efforts rendered in three acquisition for Netlify, which first started in May when the company took over Y Combinator-funded collaboration service, dubbed FeaturePeek.

Next, Netlify pursued GraphQL expert, OneGraph, also backed by Y Combinator, shortly after the company advertised its $105 million funding generated during Series D round.

Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, stated that the company has a crystal-clear vision and hence opportunities emerging from smaller startups are quite appealing in determining how the future of web would look like.

Even after the acquisition, the open source project will operate under Quirrel as Netlify will continue with its efforts to integrate new ideas associated with the service into its own platform.

In 2018, Netlify introduced its own serverless platform for the first time and ever since has become a fundamental feature of its service, however, it could not resolve problems faced by Netlify developers in scheduling functions or running background tasks to ensure timely operations.

As of now, Netlify is providing new scheduling feature designed with Quirrel user experience for free on its Netlify Labs, a platform used by the company to beta test new features.

Source Credit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/01/netlify-acquires-quirrel/