Headless CMS startup GraphCMS secures $10M Series A from UK-based VC
GraphCMS, the Berlin-based company behind the GraphQL-native Headless CMS (Content Management System), has raised $10 million (approx £7.2 million) in funding in a Series A round.
Helsinki and London-based early-stage VC OpenOcean led the funding round, bringing GraphCMS’s total funding to $13.7 million (approx £10 million). Further, the investment was led by their UK-based GP Ekaterina Almasque.
Other investors including, Peak Capital, Paua Ventures, Mango Capital’s Robin Vasan (investor in HashiCorp, Netlify, and others), Fauna founder and CTO Evan Weaver, and Instana (acquired by IBM) founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic, also participated in the round.
The funding comes over a year after raising €2.5M (approx £2.1 million) from Peak Capital.
How will the funding be used?
GraphCMS will use this investment to focus on API integrations, accelerate product adoption, and scale its team globally across the US, UK, and European markets.
As a part of the funding round, UK-based Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner at OpenOcean, will join the company’s board.
Joins siloed data into a single API
Founded by Michael Lukaszczyk and Daniel Winter, GraphCMS addresses challenges around liberating vast amounts of siloed data from third-party systems. GraphCMS does this through –Content Federation, a plug-and-play solution.
According to GraphCMS, users can join siloed data from diverse sources into a single API programmatically, without any middleware.
The company allows enterprises to access the single API through whichever front end they prefer, allowing a broad range of use cases – from company intranets to new financial services products.
With Content Federation, the companies can build complex applications while streamlining all their data from a single source of truth. The company that uses Content Federation can push products to market 50% more quickly, says GraphCMS.
“To build a video-on-demand platform similar to Netflix, for example, GraphCMS can query remote sources to enrich all the content and ensure consistent data is distributed to the frontend via a single API. The actual films are delivered via API from the production providers; images can be queried from a DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution; metadata like subtitles come from their corresponding sources, and enrichments like ratings and reviews come from services like IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. Within a single call to GraphCMS’s API, all these sources and content can be combined and served to a viewer within milliseconds to ensure a seamless digital experience,” says the company in the press release.
80x growth
The company has witnessed strong commercial and operational growth over 2021, achieving 80x growth in revenue since its initial seed investment in July 2018.
GraphCMS works with various clients across Europe and the United States including, audio products corporation Shure, global ed-tech platform 2U Inc., multinational telecommunications company Telenor, and two European government bodies.
Michael Lukaszczyk, CEO and Co-Founder at GraphCMS says: “There has been a significant shift in the way content is being created, delivered, and consumed, with enterprises grappling to keep up with the fast-paced requirements of the omnichannel world. Our best-in-class technology stack provides digital teams with a solution to the thorny issue of siloed data integration. This is huge in terms of accelerating the product development cycle, saving enterprises time and money, and enabling them to better serve their customers. It promises to be a key enabler of the online world as data continues to grow in importance and complexity.’
“OpenOcean’s investment in GraphCMS represents our largest initial investment to date in a Series A company”, says Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner at OpenOcean. “GraphCMS is a business primed to solve the challenges facing the industry today, from the exponential growth of siloed data to the increasing complexity of the enterprise digital journey. Firms are crying out for a new approach that delivers applications with the convenience of a database, the collaborative nature of a federated content platform, and the programmability of an API gateway. GraphCMS’ breakthrough approach combines the best of the GraphQL and content management system worlds to give their customers the edge over the competition, and the opportunity to lead the way in the era of rapid digitalisation.”