Sweden-based Grafbase bags €7.3M to help developers deploy with GraphQL APIs

Stockholm-based Grafbase, a data platform for developers, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $5M (approximately €5M) in a Seed round of funding. With this round, the company has now secured $7.3M (approximately €7.39M) in total funding.

The round was led by US-based Next47, a VC firm that invests in category-defining B2B companies. 

The round also saw participation from Alven, Uncorrelated Ventures, and a group of renowned angel investors, including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann Christensen, and Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, among others.

Micah Smurthwaite, Partner at Next47, says, “Grafbase is at the heart of two powerful trends: GraphQL and building applications at the edge. There are millions of GraphQL developers and the Graph is changing how companies build software. Distributed networks, such as Cloudflare Workers, are allowing developers to build applications at the edge, closer to the end user. With Grafbase, developers can create a single GraphQL endpoint with a fully-featured backend that is replicated at the edge, globally.”

Capital utilisation

Grafbase says it will use the funds to accelerate its product development and double the size of its team. The company, which is remote-first, is distributed across Europe and the US, and is available for developers now.

Fredrik Björk, founder and CEO of Grafbase, says, “Building and deploying backends has been complex and time-consuming for years. We have built Grafbase to make the deployment of GraphQL backends seamless and blazingly fast.”

“With Grafbase, developers can create a GraphQL endpoint with a complete backend, including API and database. All projects deployed to Grafbase come with a serverless database that is seamlessly integrated with every GraphQL API. This way, backend projects scale from zero to enterprise making it cost-effective at any scale,” adds Björk.

The data platform for developers

Founded in 2021 by Fredrik Björk, Grafbase is a data platform for developers that accelerates backend deployment via serverless GraphQL APIs. The platform enables developers to go from idea to production in seconds without spending time on infrastructure.

Since Grafbase was launched in beta to the developer community in early August, hundreds of projects have already been created with a growing community forming in Discord. Some early adopters are building mobile, e-commerce, and Jamstack backends already.

Before founding Grafbase, Swedish-born Fredrik Björk, who started coding at the age of 9, was the CTO at The RealReal. Previously, he was the founder and CTO of Avatars United, a social network for the metaverse that was acquired by Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) in 2010.