The Strapi story

With the help of amazing open-source contributors, we’re on a mission to develop the most customizable CMS on the market, empowering developers to create millions of digital projects.

Strapi enables content-rich experiences to be created, managed and exposed to any digital product, channel or device. It’s self-hosted. 100% Javascript. Headless. Community first. And open-source. And will stay that way forever.

Strapi is vendor-agnostic, it is designed to work with all the jamstack sites, static site generators such as React, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Vue.js, Gatsby or Angular, supports both SQL and NoSQL databases and can be hosted anywhere you want: AWS, Netlify, Heroku, a VPS, or a dedicated server.

When Aurélien, Jim, and Pierre met at a computer science university in 2013, they were already passionate about the Internet and web development. Like many programmers, they started building websites using traditional CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. But the traditional CMSs available were not customizable enough and the only way was to hack them, and the result was always dirty, slow, and not customizable.

As heavy users of open-source projects and because they already were open-source enthusiasts, they published the project on GitHub in October 2015. Strapi was born!

Founded in May 2016 as a school project in Paris, France by Pierre Burgy (CEO), Aurélien Georget (CPO) and Jim Laurie (CTO), Strapi is the number one open-source headless CMS with 30,000+ stars on GitHub, 600 contributors, more than 2 million downloads and is in use at many Global 500 companies across all industries such as IBM, NASA and Walmart.

The first round of funding has been raised in 2019 to accelerate the development of new features and ideas. The round was led by Accel and Stride.vc. Notable angel investors and open-source experts, Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (Ex-CTO at Cloudera), also participated in this round.

Throughout 2019, Strapi has been the first open-source solution on headlesscms.org and a few more key people have been hired to join the adventure.

The second round of funding took place in May 2020. Notable angel investors and open-source experts have been participating in the round: 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. 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).

Strapi has a name that was inspired by its first mission:

Bootstrap your API = Strapi

From the very beginning, the mission of Strapi has always been to simplify the day to day work of developers by removing painful and repetitive tasks and to unleash content to be delivered anywhere.