Pantheon is a startup that was founded in 2010 and only has 13 employees, but it’s already sitting on $6.3 million in venture capital. That’s including this week’s $5 million funding round, led by the Foundry Group with participation from a few of the company’s existing backers  – Baseline, First Round, and Founders Collective.

What stands behind Pentheon’s success is a hosted version of Drupal that runs on the Rackspace Cloud and eliminates the need to deploy the popular CMS on in-house servers. This makes it more viable for enterprises that may be running WordPress or other less favorable alternatives simply because it doesn’t involve as much hassle as an on-premise Drupal deployment.

The mastermind behind it all is CEO Zack Rosen, an entrepreneur who is also one of the very founders of the Drupal community.  He is joined by David Strauss, another expert on the CMS, and others with similar experience.

Rosen’s small startup is already serving hundreds of customers, including enterprises such as NBC Universal and academia, as well as other organizations.

“The majority of the market doesn’t have a real CMS yet,” Rosen said. “These companies should adopt a web-based CMS that is delivered as a ‘software-as-a-service.’ Companies don’t want to deal with servers these days.”

With a fresh round of funding and the faith of the Valley’s elite, Pantheon has growth on its mind and new features in the pipeline.  One standing challenge for the company is growing to scale, as it hosts all of the sites running on its platform.  And for a company like Pantheon, there’s no one thing to scale.

“There’s technology pieces, the actual building of our service–there’s definitely a challenge to scale that service, and on a daily basis we’re adding a lot of traffic,” Rosen says.  “That’s going to be an ongoing challenge mostly on the engineering side.  What we’re focusing on now is features–new offerings to better support those using our platform.  As we add more customers we need to make sure they have support.  What all this means is we’re hiring very actively,” indicating the small but mighty team may not be so tiny for long.

Content management is not a trending topic, but is still an area that some vendors rightfully consider as important. Applicasa even offers functionality that addresses things like notifications and content updates in its backend-as-a-service.

The value prop behind the platform is that it can take care of server-side scripting for less than  what an offshore dev team would charge, and probably faster too. Applicasa is targeting mobile developers with its offering, and recently extended support to Android in a milestone push.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher