Tiny Raises $4M in Series A Funding, Publishes Gutenberg FAQ

Tiny, the company formerly known as Ephox has raised $4M in Series A funding from BlueRun Ventures. Tiny is the company behind TinyMCE, a popular text editor used in many opensource projects, including WordPress.

In addition to the funding, Jeff Tannenbaum, partner at BlueRun Ventures is joining Tiny’s board of directors. The company has also launched Tiny Drive, a preview of TinyMCE 5, and the Tiny App Directory.

TinyMCE’s Relationship With Gutenberg

Gutenberg is built on top of TinyMCE and this has led to few misconceptions about the project. To alleviate these misconceptions, Tiny published a Gutenberg and TinyMCE FAQ earlier this year.

TinyMCE is used by the Classic Editor but as the FAQ explains, they are not one in the same and never have been.

The Classic Editor is less than TinyMCE in that it exposes just 6 of the 54 of the official plugins and a fraction of the UI. A popular WordPress plugin called TinyMCE Advanced created by Andrew Ozz exposes more of TinyMCE’s UI, core features, and plugins.

The Classic Editor is also more than TinyMCE in that there is significant custom code in WordPress. This includes WordPress-specific UI components and backend code for embedding, links, media, and more. Some of the filtering code is specific to WordPress.
Andrew Roberts

Gutenberg uses TinyMCE to provide rich text editing and provides a Classic editor block that contains some UI elements from TinyMCE, but that’s about it.

Both projects have a close relationship but as Roberts noted on TechCrunch, the two are not mutually dependent on each other.

“Tiny’s core business comes from a mix of software vendors, large enterprises, and agencies building custom solutions for clients that has little to do with the WordPress ecosystem,” Roberts told TechCrunch. “It is a popular and commercially viable project in its own right.

While TinyMCE 5 features a brand new UI, earlier versions such as 4.7 were inspired by beta versions of Gutenberg. Tiny is not yet committed to making block based editing the default but is keeping a close eye on how Gutenberg rolls out.

TinyMCE and WordPress are open source projects that will continue to benefit each other as it makes sense.

“The TinyMCE and WordPress projects have had a symbiotic relationship over the years. We hope that this goodwill and sense of community continues for many years to come,” Roberts said.