Paris-based Strapi, an open-source headless CMS platform, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $31M (approximately €29.31M) in a Series B round of funding.
The round was led by US-based CRV, a venture capital firm that invests at early-stages in technology companies.
Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, says, “Finding a content management system that delights developers and allows them to move fast while providing the content managers with a high level of autonomy remains a challenge for many companies. With its developer-first approach based on open source and customisation, Strapi is uniquely positioned to solve that challenge for many companies across a large range of applications and use cases.”
The round also saw participation from Flex Capital, Index Ventures, BPI France, Raise Sherpas, and new Angel investors Ashley Smith, Former GitLab CMO and GitHub VP of Marketing, Nat Friedman, Former GitHub CEO, Nicolas Dessaigne, co-founder of Algolia, and, Matt Billmann Christensen, CEO of Netlify.
What does Strapi offer?
Founded in 2016 by Aurélien Georget, Jim Laurie and Pierre Burgy, Strapi is an open-source software that helps developers build, deploy, and manage APIs easily.
The company’s open-source headless CMS provides backend functionality for applications and gives developers the tools of their choice for front-end frameworks. It’s called headless because the frontend is not part of the CMS, but there’s an API for content to show up on different devices.
Content teams use Strapi to manage all types of content and distribute it from one CMS to any channel – websites, mobile apps, or connected devices. With more than 750+ contributors and over 7 million downloads, Strapi claims to be one of the fastest-growing open-source projects and the “most” customisable Headless CMS.
As described in the company’s public company handbook, its strategy is based on 3 pillars:
- A Developer Experience (Create) to empower developers to build and ship projects faster than ever before.
- A large and qualitative Ecosystem (Connect) of technology and solution partners providing products and services on top of Strapi to fit the needs of all users.
- An Editing Experience (Collaborate) to provide full autonomy to content editors who are used to no-code tools and intuitive admin panels.
In November 2021, the company released Strapi v4, the foundation on top of which the company is continuously building these 3 pillars. This new product included a new design system, user interface, plug-in API (application programming interface), database query engine, and improved REST and GraphQL API performance.
Co-founder Pierre Burgy says, “With Strapi v4, we have improved the developer experience in terms of customisation and extensibility. These new capabilities together with the new design system provide a solid foundation for the Strapi ecosystem to grow along with the number of plug-ins and integrations.”
The company says that with Strapi v4, community users are now able to:
- Create and maintain plug-ins through a new programmatic API and an inclusive Design System optimised for accessibility, thus providing a better experience for both developers and content managers.
- Quickly migrate and upgrade between different Strapi versions.
- Give full control to plug-in and application developers on data querying through a flexible and “powerful” database query engine which also speeds up the development of new custom features.
- Make the REST and GraphQL API simpler and customisable.
- Manage the access of the Content API through API Tokens administered from the admin panel to authenticate REST and GraphQL queries.
- Quickly spot and fix errors in applications with standardised error codes and context.
Fund utilisation
Strapi says that the proceeds will allow the company to accelerate building a sustainable business and invest in the development of the Strapi open source community and ecosystem.
In order to achieve this, the company will invest in the editing experience by tackling the issues that have received the most attention, such as enhancing the writing experience with more Rich-Text Editor options or reviewing the current ‘Draft & Publish’ feature to manage multiple content versions simultaneously.
All these new features will benefit from fine-tuned integrations with the existing features such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Content Internationalisation, says the company.
By allowing users to add new fields (i.e map, videos, colour picker, etc) to any content types, the upcoming Custom Fields feature will also provide a better display, enriched data, and make actions readily available from the admin panel. It will also enable a new wave of plugins particularly useful to content editors such as integrations with personalisation tools, visual builders, or e-commerce solutions.
Strapi Market to centralise a trusted ecosystem
Together with all the Strapi community members and contributors, the company claims to unlock the creation of a massive and open ecosystem. There are already more than 2,000 Strapi plugins and providers developed by Strapi users, which represent more than 700K monthly downloads.
To find the best Strapi plugins and instantly add new features to projects, Strapi recently announced the launch of Strapi Market, the official marketplace listing all Strapi plugins and providers available.
The company claims that Strapi Cloud will make Strapi even more accessible to non-technical users who will be able to leverage pre-built templates, easily preview content updates, and quickly set up new integrations with other services.
Currently, there are more than 80 plugins on Strapi Market with more plugins being added every week.
Soon to be launched – Strapi Cloud
At StrapiConf 2022 in February, Strapi revealed its plans to launch a new product called Strapi Cloud that will easily deploy, host, and scale Strapi projects.
In a statement, the company mentions, “We chose a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) approach to embrace our open-source DNA and preserve Strapi’s unique customisation capabilities. With Strapi Cloud we’re doubling down on the Developer Experience and offering a seamless deployment process that requires absolutely no DevOps skills. Developers will be able to start their project locally, customise it according to their needs, version it through Git, and deploy it in seconds.”
General availability of the product is planned for 2023. In the meantime, the company is offering users to join its waitlist for beta testing.
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