We are happy this morning to announce we’ve raised a $3 million round of funding, from Redpoint Ventures and some other great investors.

Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku with the goal of making software development much easier and more accessible. We’ve got big plans – what we’ve done so far is really just the first step. There is so much we’ve been dying to do, but we just haven’t had the capacity.

This investment will allow us to beef up our current offerings, expand into other parts of the development process, and build out the company to support our quickly growing developer community.

This deal has been in the works for a few months, and we’re just so excited to have both the financial resources and partners like Redpoint to help us realize our vision.

In the meantime, our private beta is really rocking. We now have over 10,000 developers building apps on the platform, with over 12,000 apps built so far. This enormous amount of activity is really helping us to hone Heroku into a smooth and sharp tool, and we look forward to opening up the beta in the coming months.

We can’t wait to unveil some of the stuff we’ve got in the pipeline. Stay tuned!

	Quote (Adam to investors): “I’m not coming to any board meetings earlier than 3pm.”
	Quote (James to investors): “Who’s the CEO? Well, I lost rock-paper-scissors, so I guess that’s me.”
	Quote (Orion to investors): “Can I get some of that in quarters? My laundry is really starting to pile up.”

More coverage: VentureBeat, TechCrunch

Heroku now has an API (accessible from the command line, a Ruby library, or REST calls), revision control on all apps with Git, and remote access to the Git repository.

The combination of these new features means that you can now work on your apps using the local tools you love – like TextMate, vi, or emacs – and still get the benefit of zero-configuration deployment to Heroku.

How does it work? Grab the Heroku gem with “gem install heroku”. A sample work session looks like this:

heroku clone myapp
cd myapp
ruby script/server
...edit locally...
git add .
git commit -m "local changes" 
git push

The final step will deploy the app to Heroku, including running the migrations on the database and restarting the server. Watch the screencast to see it in action, or just grab the gem and give it a try yourself. RDocs here.

Combine your local tools and the Heroku in-the-cloud development tools in any combination you like. Perhaps you want to work locally while at home, but use the web editor when traveling. Every commit to the repository is available from both.

Heroku now has a mailing list on Google Groups. Stop by and introduce yourself, but first read the welcome post.

If you’re curious about our vision for Heroku, check out the latest episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. We spoke with Geoffrey Grosenbach about our plans for Heroku, the Rails ecosystem, and some good old fashioned economics.

Last night we noticed a flood of .jp email addresses appearing on the waiting list – several hundred over the course of just a few hours. Turns out someone posted a comprehensive and flattering review of Heroku in Japanese (translation). I just couldn’t resist using the opportunity to post this image:

Actually, it’s not just Japan: the international response to Heroku has astonished us. Denmark, New Zealand, France, Russia, Brazil – over half of our users are from outside the US. We chalk this up more to the universal appeal of Ruby and Rails than anything we’ve done, but either way it’s pretty cool.

By the way, we know news on the Heroku front has been a little quiet lately. That’s because we’ve got some big stuff brewing. Stay tuned – the best is still yet to come.