Web operations startup Pantheon Systems Inc. hit unicorn status today with a $100 million late-starge round of funding that takes its value to more than $1 billion.

The sole investor in the Series E round was SoftBank Vision Fund 2, bringing Pantheon’s total amount raised to $200 million.

Pantheon was founded in 2010 as a simple hosting service for Drupal and WordPress websites. It has since evolved into an end-to-end WebOps software-as-a-service product that not only handles hosting and publishing but also measures the performance of company’s websites.

Pantheon defines WebOps as a set of practices that facilitates collaboration and automates processes aimed at improving the productivity of entire web teams, including developers, designers, content editors and other stakeholders. The idea is to help companies create cross-functional web teams that can develop, test and update websites faster and more reliably, and then help measure their success.

To that end, a key part of Pantheon’s SaaS offering is its structured agile workflows that enable better collaboration between developers and marketing teams.

“In order to deliver a best-in-class digital experience — and be able to iterate it every single day and work with designers and developers and website owners and project managers — you need a system of record for that work,” Pantheon co-founder and Chief Executive Zack Rosen told TechCrunch in an interview. “You need a solid workflow for those teams.”

Rosen added that there is big demand for what his company offers. He told TechCrunch that companies just want a “solid SaaS platform” that makes life easier, with hosting, content delivery networks and everything else that has become table stakes for hosting websites. “They just want a partner — like any other SaaS application, whether it’s Stripe, Twilio or Salesforce,” he said. “They just want it to work and not to worry about it.”

The size of Pantheon’s huge customer base supports that claim. The company said it powers WebOps for more than 12,000 businesses worldwide that see more than a billion unique website visitors combined. Big-name clients include DocuSign Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Patagonia Inc. and the United Nations Foundation.

In a blog post, Rosen said Pantheon will use its new funds primarily to grow its product development and customer success teams. The company wants to accelerate product innovation and expand its capabilities in areas such as analytics and personalization, he said.

Rosen told TechCrunch that Pantheon wasn’t under any pressure to raise money and it still has plenty of cash in the bank, but the money will help the company accelerate those plans. He added that SoftBank’s team are “huge believers” in the future of WebOps and can help it to reach the scale it needs to define the category.

“Digital transformation has accelerated the movement to the cloud for essential business infrastructure,” said SoftBank Investment Advisers Partner Vikas Parekh. “By automating workflows and do-it-yourself with its SaaS offering, we believe Pantheon’s platform is transforming how modern website experiences are created.”

Image: Pantheon