Madrona Venture Group, Founder's Co-op and First Round Capital are pumping $1.8 million into PHP Fog, a Portland cloud computing startup that is developing a new easy-to-use platform for PHP developers. PHP Fog has yet to release its platform, but the company is already drawing comparisons to Heroku. That San Francisco startup, backed by Ignition Partners and others, sold to Salesforce.com late last year for as much as $249 million.

"PHP Fog is like Heroku for PHP. But better," the company writes on its Web site. "We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there. It just works."

Mashable has more details on the new startup, as well as a short interview with its founder, Lucas Carlson.

This marks the second investment in the Portland area by Founder's Co-op, the Seattle investment firm led by Andy Sack, Geoff Entress and Chris DeVore. The firm also is a backer of mobile app maker Urban Airship, which raised $5.4 million last year.

In addition to PHP Fog, Seattle-based Madrona also have invested in Portland's ShopIgniter.