Strapi closes $10 M series A Funding

Introduction

We’re very excited to announce that Strapi, Inc has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Index Ventures with the participation from notable angel investors and open-source experts, including Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino, CEO and CTO of Kong, respectively, and David Cramer, co-founder and CTO of Sentry.

Only 6 months after raising $4 million in seed funding with Accel and Stride.VC, this new round has brought the company’s total funding to $14 million.

Strapi is now in a unique position to realize and execute its mission of fueling the world’s creativity and productivity by unleashing the power of content. With the help of amazing open source contributors, we’re creating the most customizable CMS on the market and empowering developers to create millions of digital projects.

Now more than ever, our ability to successfully raise such a significant amount of funding is a real sign that Strapi is well-positioned to become an industry standard as the de facto Headless CMS. Such an achievement has only been possible through the wonderful support of the broader Strapi community and the core Strapi team. The continual contributions to Strapi are what make it what it is today.

We also are very excited to share with you today our new website and branding! We will soon publish a post to give you more details about the process we went through and the stack we use, which obviously includes Strapi.

We would like to send out a special thank you to everyone who has taken the time to become a part of the journey!

When websites are regularly crashing under the strain of an ever-increasing volume of traffic, the Strapi's value for making the web faster and more secure at a lower cost makes more sense than ever.

Welcoming Index to the Strapi family

Some of the most successful projects ever created, like Confluent, Elastic, Kong, or CockroachDB, have something significant in common: they are backed by Index Ventures.

Welcoming Index to the Strapi family makes perfect sense for us and puts our name among other game-changing projects. We are convinced that their philosophy, their experience with open-source projects, and their understanding of our vision will add a lot of value and strong benefits to Strapi and its community.

“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,” said Ari Helgason, Principal at Index Ventures, who joined as a board member. “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.”

JAMstack and the Strapi Ecosystem

The CMS market has drastically changed in the last decade. Over the past few years especially, content has evolved and is no longer only displayed on websites in a browser. Everything is published on a countless number of devices and mediums. Even the basics of website creation have changed with front-end developers wanting to use modern frameworks like React, Next.js, Gatsby, Vue.js, Nuxt.js, or Angular in order to ensure quick and responsive experiences for end-users.

All these changes in use-cases and expectations have led to a new architecture: the JAMstack. Front-end deployment is now completely separated from the CMS. Content is now served via an API.

While traditional CMSs are decreasing in popularity, headless ones are gaining market share. Having an API-first CMS designed for modern, omnichannel, digital experiences, offers unlimited possibilities for content.

Strapi, Headless CMS, and JAMstack in Google Trends

Strapi has been committed to being fully open-source under a permissive MIT license since day one. The other founders and I have all experienced building websites with a traditional CMS, making it an easy choice to build something that is open-source and welcoming to a community of contributors.

We wanted the leading Headless CMS to be made and supported by a worldwide community of developers and fans.

The CMS market has always been led by open-source software and big companies have always wanted to host content in-house, on their servers. The ongoing issues have always stemmed from how developers, content creators, and end-users need flexibility and customization.

5 years after the first commit to Strapi on GitHub and we're all the more confident in our decision. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 1 million downloads on npm
• 25,000+ stars on GitHub
• 400+ contributors – 95 percent outside of the core Strapi team
• 13,000+ commits
• 300+ Community plugins published on npm
• 10+ community-led user-groups
• 4,000+ Strapi related projects on GitHub
• Integration with many technology providers, deployment, and cloud platforms

In 2020, Strapi powers thousands of projects. From small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, Strapi covers industries as diverse as IBM, NASA, Société Générale and Delivery Hero.

How We Will Use the New Funding

Investing in the Open Source Community

As a part of the open-source movement, Strapi will always have one top priority: growing the community and ensuring everyone enjoys contributing to Strapi.

The new boost in funding is sure to help us release new features in accordance with those most requested on our public roadmap.

The goal is to build a better product that works with the community. As a part of that, the bigger core Strapi team will allow for even better documentation, guides, and community support.

The Strapi community is global. Connecting developers and creators worldwide lets more people work together while gaining new insights and perspectives into how to build the best CMS in the world.

In order to further facilitate these unique opportunities, we will double our effort to publish more tutorials with the Write For The Community program and organize more meetups no matter where you are. Even if everything needs to be completely virtual for a while, we are committed to helping build a community that enjoys exchanging thoughts and sharing ideas.

Building a Marketplace for the Strapi Ecosystem

The success behind the vast majority of open-source projects has always depended on the community and the ecosystem supporting the project.

Strapi has always been designed around an eventual extensive plugin system. After creating Buffet.js, the React component library used in Strapi, we knew we wanted to give anyone and everyone the ability to create plugins using the same design.

While the beginnings of the plugin system are already available, we will be drastically improving the entire experience. Developing, installing, and updating a plugin will be easier than ever, thanks to internal APIs.

300 community plugins published on npm is a very good start. Some of them are listed on the awesome-strapi repository. We're aiming to make the list grow into thousands of plugins. Help us work together to make the number of features, integrations, and use-cases nearly infinite!

Building Enterprise Capabilities

The open-source version of Strapi is and will stay free and open-source. However, as a company, we also have to generate profit to become a sustainable business, allowing us to further invest in and support the open-source Strapi project.

We will keep continually releasing more and more accessible and open-source features, but on top of that will develop paid features (delivered as plugins) for product and marketing teams managing content at scale.

Similar to Elastic and GitLab, Strapi is built on an open-core model. That means there are two versions of Strapi: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE).

Like the Community Edition, both the roadmap and source code of the enterprise version will be openly planned and developed. Anyone interested can easily contribute to the code, whether partners or customers.

Some of the features included in our Enterprise Edition roadmap include advanced Role-Based Access Control, Content Internationalization, SSO, Audit Logs and advanced publication workflows. The first version of Strapi EE with Role-Based Access Control will be available beginning of July.

Feel free to fill out this form for more information.

Onward and Upward

This fundraising round is great news for Strapi and the community, but the best is yet to come! Thanks again to all the contributors and our dedicated team for making Strapi better daily. As a part of our efforts to better the entire Strapi experience, we opened several job positions. If you want to be part of the next step in the journey, feel free to apply here!

Want to try out Strapi? Take a look at the getting started guide or test everything out with a live demo. It goes without saying, but everyone at Strapi also wishes you the best in these troubling times. Stay safe and let's work on building a better future for content together!

If you want to learn more about Strapi and our roadmap, sign up for a live Q&A with Strapi co-founders: Pierre Burgy (CEO), Aurélien Georget (CPO) and Jim Laurie (CTO) next Thursday, May 28th at 9 am PST.