Slice-Based Website Builder Company Prismic Raises $20 Million

By Noah Long • May 27, 2021
  • Prismic announced recently it has raised $20 million in funding to deploy its fully-customizable website builder in the massive content creation market. These are the details.

Prismic announced it has raised $20 million in funding to deploy its fully-customizable website builder in the massive content creation market. The company has been bootstrapped since its inception with its headquarters in Paris and a presence in Cambridge, MA. And Prismic has been profitable since 2016 and with over one third of its customers in North America. The Series A funding is co-lead by Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo and comes on the heels of their product-led international growth.

Slices are known as customizable sections that can be mixed and matched to create unique, branded templated pages on an ongoing basis. And they are used by small and big businesses alike, including North American-based companies such as DigitalOcean, HomeDepot, and RE/MAX to easily edit online content.

A Headless CMS at its foundation, Prismic comes at a fully customizable website builder. And unlike Web template tools that have rigid pre-made templates and are restricted to designing an entire page, Prismic is about building individual branded sections (slices).

This caters to companies that regularly produce new content and want more flexibility with their design without endless iterations with developers. This is especially helpful with industries like e-commerce retail, real estate companies and advertising agencies, and freelancers that work with both larger and smaller companies on an ongoing basis for branded content design.

In-house developers, agencies and freelancers utilize Prismic to create custom slices in their technology of choice, using React.js, or Vue.js components, and package them into a Website Builder. And content teams create and update pages of their site by assembling and filling slices with content without needing to sync or reach out to developers every time an update needs to be made.

Through a shortage of developer talent and an ever increasing demand for updated content, the plug and play SaaS option for branded and customized website sections is helping to solve a significant problem in today’s web development.

KEY QUOTES:

“We experienced increased demand the past year from companies and individuals using Prismic to customize sections or “slices ” of their websites. We are leaning into the trend to accelerate our growth and help companies reduce reliance on developers by making Prismic the standard way companies are building websites.” 

“2020 was obviously an unusual year and it has changed the way companies do business and reach out to their clients. Retail is an excellent example where we saw over one third of our customer base increase their content creation. As more companies realized that they needed to have a robust e-commerce offering to survive the pandemic, they found that they needed to go beyond the Product and create a digital brand experience with a lot of storytelling.”

“This year we have helped some of the biggest names in the retail industry to scale up their content creation and have provided SMB clients with no previous online offering with an affordable way to initiate one.

Our customers find the concept of a fully-customizable page builder very powerful, and we observed that once they come across the concept of slices they begin seeing them in every website and app. The Web is made up of slices and the need for a solution to update and create pages without continuous developer support begins to make so much sense.”

— Sadek Drobi, Founder and CEO of Prismic.

“Sadek and his team were able to build a powerful and agile solution that already convinced users around the world, without raising external capital. The success of Prismic was driven by their product-first approach and their community-led strategy. We valued these achievements and are happy to give them more resources to keep growing.” 

— Cyril Guenoun from Aglaé Ventures

“While traditional CMS architecture may remain the standard approach for blogs, personal sites and the most basic company websites, we believe that a growing and lasting demand for more flexible, scalable and customizable Content Management systems will emerge from businesses.” 

— Nicolas Debock from Eurazeo