Headless CMS Company Strapi Raises $4 Million In Seed Funding

By Dan Anderson • Oct 21, 2019
  • Headless CMS company Strapi recently announced it raised $4 million in seed funding led by Accel and Stride.vc

Strapi recently announced it raised $4 million in seed funding led by Accel and Stride.vc. And angel investors and open-source experts who participated in this round include Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (Ex-CTO at Cloudera).

This round of funding will be used for delivering on the company’s mission to make content accessible to any platform while offering the only fully open-source, JavaScript-based, community-powered and 100% customizable Headless CMS — which is entirely free for developers.

Strapi was founded by Aurélien Georget, Jim Laurie, and Pierre Burgy. And they started building websites using traditional CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in order to save a lot of time. But with the emergence of smartphones in all sorts of sizes, the company had to shift gears since content and data was being consumed from a wide variety of environments, including websites, apps, smart watches, etc. Rather than duplicating content management, it made more sense to centralize and make it omnichannel.

And website creation also changed. Rapid AJAX-based sites that adapted to mobile screens became much more ubiquitous. Developers became more full-stack and started dividing projects into separate directories (example: API and client).

Strapi was born out of the frustration that the trio of founders felt were the limitations of traditional CMS frameworks. So they decided to build their own. In 2016, they incorporated the company and developed several projects with the software to battle test the platform. Now the platform is used by thousands of companies such as IBM, Asos, and Walmart.

With the funding, the primary foucs is to provide the most requested features and enhance the existing ones. Strapi should become easier to deploy and a stable version will be released.

Strapi was built to be highly customizable and extensible through a powerful plugin system. And the system will be finalized to make plugin development, publication, and updates seamless. The goal of a Headless CMS is to be connected to clients through a website, a mobile app, or even a smart refrigerator.

How will Strapi generate revenue? Eventually, the company will start offering paid features for enterprise use-cases.