Berlin based GraphCMS has raised $10M (nearly €8.4M) in a Series A funding round. The round was led by OpenOcean, and previous investors Peak and Paua Ventures also participated. Fauna founder and CTO, Evan Weaver, and Instana’s (acquired by IBM) founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic also joined this round. The startup has raised a total of $13.7M (approx €11.6M), to date.
With the proceeds, the startup plans to expand its commercial footprint within the US and European markets and also support businesses in bringing world-class content experiences in a fraction of time.
Fund Utilisation
GraphCMS also plans to use the new funding to leverage its API integrations, accelerate product adoption, and scale its team globally, with a particular focus on North America and Europe. Partnerships with digital agencies, software integrators and technology partners will help the company to rapidly scale and expand its footprint. Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner at OpenOcean, will join the company’s board.
In terms of growth, the startup claims to have seen immense commercial and operational growth over 2021, achieving 80x growth in revenue since its initial seed investment in July 2018. The company comes with a strong consumer base across Europe and the United States, and current customers include audio products corporation Shure, global edtech 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. GraphCMS is the solution to a world where content is king, and data from microservices is vital for companies from all sectors. 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.”
GraphCMS
GraphCMS’s Content Federation helps in joining siloed data from many sources into a single API programmatically. Enterprises can then access this single API via whichever front end they prefer, allowing a broad range of use cases – from company intranets, to new financial services products. These companies then use Content Federation to push products to market 50 per cent more quickly.
The Content Federation helps companies to build complex applications while streamlining all their data from a single source of truth. For example, if someone tries to create a video-on-demand platform that is similar to Netflix, then GraphCMS can query remote sources to enrich all the content and ensure consistent data is distributed to the frontend via a single API.
Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, GraphCMS is developed by GraphCMS GmbH and is currently enabling nearly 50,000 teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s omnichannel digital experiences at scale.
Currently, most of GraphCMS’s development team operate from Gießen, a quaint town in the Hesse region of Germany. The commercial team works out of the Berlin HQ. It claims to be an international and remote-friendly company. Along with its team in Germany, the company also has team members in the UK, India, the US, Brazil, and Argentina.
“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.”