Heroku

Heroku was founded in July 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry, and went through Y Combinator's 2008 batch. It launched commercially with Ruby support in 2009 and introduced an idea that felt like magic at the time: developers could deploy a web app to the cloud by typing 'git push heroku', with no servers to provision, no operating systems to patch, and no infrastructure to wire together. The platform abstracted away the entire operational layer behind 'dynos' and a clean command-line workflow. For a generation of Rails developers, Heroku was the default way to put an idea on the internet, and its free tier made it the place where countless side projects, prototypes, and first startups were born.

Heroku grew fast. By May 2010 more than 60,000 apps were running on the platform, and by the time of its acquisition it powered over 105,000 cloud applications. In December 2010, Salesforce announced it would buy Heroku for about $212 million in cash, then its largest acquisition, betting on Heroku as the on-ramp for the next generation of Ruby and Java developers. Heroku had raised only around $13 million before the deal. The acquisition validated the PaaS category and gave Heroku enterprise backing, but it also placed a fast-moving, developer-obsessed startup inside a sales-driven CRM giant whose priorities lay elsewhere.