With Laravel hiring a bunch of new team members and seeing the Laravel copyright change to "Laravel Holdings Inc." I half expected Taylor to announce that he'd taken outside investment.
I wouldn't fault him if he did, but I kinda hope that Laravel remains bootstrapped/independent.
I'm pretty sure they did take outside money, not sure in which form - loan, investment, etc.
Laravel products are big but I don't think they are THAT big to pay good salaries to 30+ people.
But Taylor doesn't have to disclose it, really. Business decisions are not for public. Same partnership with Sentry: we don't know the details.
However, I think Taylor negotiated all the partnerships in a way that he stays the decision maker.
Has Laravel been acquired now (by Acquaint Softtech Private Limited) ? www.crunchbase.com/organization/laravel
But actually, not sure about the accuracy of this, Crunchbase says announcement date "May 5, 2023" (so I guess we would have heard about it by now?) with no links to back it up.
From one of the recent-ish podcasts, it sounds like the Laravel company does make enough money to pay for 30+ people.
My memory is that Taylor was talking about previously being conservative with spending, but is now investing company money into staff and R&D to grow Laravel. But only to "break-even", not with investment or risky spending.
But I could be wrong on all of that.
You called it! Taylor just tweeted that Laravel raised $57M in Series A funding. 🤯