NEW YORK, July 14, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Squarespace, an industry leading web publishing platform, today announced that it closed a US$38.5M minority growth investment led by Index Ventures and Accel Partners. This is the first outside capital that Squarespace has raised since its founding in 2003.

As part of this transaction, joining Squarespace's newly formed board will be Dominique Vidal, of Index Ventures' growth team, Andrew Braccia, from Accel's investment team, and Jonathan Klein, Founder and CEO of Getty Images. Founder Anthony Casalena will remain the company's largest shareholder.

Squarespace was founded by Anthony Casalena with the goal of redefining publishing on the Web. Today, Squarespace's SaaS platform powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Businesses, bloggers, web developers and artists use Squarespace to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high quality websites. Squarespace's product is differentiated by its intense focus on design, integration and scalability. Notable customers include Marc Ecko, Porter Novelli, Bob Woodruff, Kevin Pollak, and Don Imus.

Squarespace has created a powerful product used by web developers, bloggers, and consumers around the world to build beautiful, functional and flexible websites, said Dom Vidal, partner, Index Ventures. We believe in the team, the technology, and the market potential, and are excited to be a part of such a fast growing business.

The size of the round will enable Squarespace to significantly expand operations as they seek to solve the problem of content management at its core, and allow its new partners to contribute to and participate in Squarespace's continued success.

Squarespace has been a profitable business since its first year of operation. This investment will not change that, but it will allow us to be much more aggressive in our quest to both create an incredible product and bring that product to market, said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace's founder.

With the Squarespace web publishing platform, you can:

-- Quickly publish and manage a highly functional web site, including a blog and portfolio. -- Host on an expandable grid infrastructure that can manage sites of any size across the globe. -- Access hand designed templates and customizable photo galleries. -- Aggregate data from across various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment, without needing 3rd party scripts. -- Use the iPhone app to check your site, post to your blog, manage blog posts, and see site traffic, while on the go. -- Easily import images, posts, and links from existing blogging platforms. -- Track visitors and usage patterns of a site with powerful analytics tools.

There are a lot of tools on the market that allow people to set up simple blogs for free. At Squarespace, we offer something different - a high quality, professional, reliable platform, designed from the ground up by us to work in a very streamlined way, said Casalena. The addition of Index, Accel and Jonathan Klein to the Squarespace team will help us achieve further growth and cement our position as a clear leader in this space.

Squarespace packages are sold on http://www.squarespace.com and start at US$8 per month.

SOURCE: Index Ventures

CONTACT: Rachel Bremer, +44-779-551-8335, for Index Ventures; or SayulaKirby of Index Ventures, +44-791-720-7297, sayula@indexventures.com