Open-Source ‘Headless’ CMS Company Strapi Raises $10 Million

By Dan Anderson • May 23, 2020
  • Strapi, the open-source “headless” content management system (CMS), announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures

Strapi — the open-source “headless” content management system (CMS) — announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $14 million.

Previously, Strapi raised $4 million in seed funding in October 2019 with Accel and Stride.VC. And the company also hired former Docker head of community Victor Coisne as VP of marketing and the company also announced plans to open its first U.S. office in San Francisco.

To create and deliver content to end-users is no longer just about implementing a responsive design. Companies simply want their content to be easily distributed over different communication channels, including websites, web and mobile applications, and connected objects. And through APIs, Strapi enables companies to efficiently manage the distribution of this content from a single source and personalize the message so that it is more suited to each channel.

Strapi essentially gives developers the freedom to integrate their favorite tools while reducing hosting and development costs. And as a “Headless CMS”, Strapi provides backend functionality for mobile applications or any type of connected object. Plus it is also particularly suitable for websites designed according to the JAMstack model (JavaScript, API and pre-rendered markup, served without Web servers).

And Strapi is designed to work with the most popular front-end frameworks, including Gatsby, Nuxt, Next.js or any other static site generator. Plus it supports most databases and can be requested using both REST and GraphQL.

By making the administrator panel and API customizable and extensible through a plug-in system, Strapi enables the world’s largest companies to accelerate content delivery while building better digital experiences. And notable angel investors and open-source experts are also participating in the round, including Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino (respectively CEO and CTO of Kong), David Cramer (co-founder and CTO of Sentry), Florian Douetteau (co-founder and CEO of Dataiku). Plus angel investors and open-source experts who also participated in the previous round included Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (founder of Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js, and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (former CTO at Cloudera).

Launched in May 2016 as a school project in Paris, France by Pierre Burgy (CEO), Aurélien Georget (CPO) and Jim Laurie (CTO), Strapi is known as the number one open-source headless CMS with 25,000 stars on GitHub, 400 contributors, and over 1 million downloads.

Key Quotes:

“Traditional CMS that were introduced 20 years ago, have a monolithic legacy architecture that is difficult to maintain, often slow, and vulnerable to hackers while most modern CMS lack flexibility and ability to be customized. Strapi is making content management easy, fast, and secure for everyone. With the help of our vibrant and growing open source community, we’ve created one of the most customizable and flexible CMS on the market — empowering developers to quickly and easily create robust APIs powering millions of digital projects.”

– Pierre Burgy, co-founder, and CEO of Strapi

“The proliferation of different types of content being consumed on a growing number of devices has created a lot of complexity. Because of this developers are taking the lead in building modern, custom solutions to make all content available anytime, anywhere. We’ve been impressed by Strapi’s API-based open-source approach that puts developers in charge, and are excited to partner with the Strapi team in building the CMS that will be powering the internet.”

– Ari Helgason, principal at Index Ventures