Strapi closes $31M Series B led by CRV

Today, we’re delighted to announce that Strapi has closed a $31M Series B round of funding! This round was led by CRV with participation from Flex Capital, Index Ventures, BPI France, Raise Sherpas as well as new notable Angel investors: Ashley Smith (Former GitLab CMO and GitHub VP of Marketing), Nat Friedman (Former GitHub CEO), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia Cofounder) and Matt Biilmann Christensen (Netlify CEO).

In addition to giving us significant financial resources at a time of global uncertainty, this new funding allows us to accelerate on building a sustainable business and invest in the development of the Strapi open source community and ecosystem. Most importantly, it will enable us to deliver on our mission of empowering millions of people to share and manage any content, anywhere.

“Finding a content management system that delights developers and allows them to move fast while providing the content managers with a high level of autonomy remains a challenge for many companies,” said Reid Christian, general partner at CRV. ”With its developer-first approach based on open source and customization, Strapi is uniquely positioned to solve that challenge for many companies across a large range of applications and use cases.”

Growing Strapi together with the Community

Our vision for Strapi has come a long way since the first commit back in 2015. Headless is becoming the de-facto architecture to overcome the complexity associated with a long tail of use cases spanning across more and more devices, formats, sources, and stakeholders.

With more than 45K stars on GitHub, 750+ contributors, and more than 7 million downloads, Strapi is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects and the most customizable Headless CMS. Thousands of companies are now using Strapi to save countless hours developing future-proof applications making content management more composable and collaborative.

As described in our public company handbook, our company strategy is based on 3 pillars:

1. An amazing Developer Experience (Create) to empower developers to build and ship projects faster than ever before.
2. A large and qualitative Ecosystem (Connect) of technology and solution partners providing products and services on top of Strapi to fit the needs of all our users.
3. A delightful Editing Experience (Collaborate) to provide full autonomy to content editors who are used to no-code tools and intuitive admin panels.

Strapi v4 is the foundation on top of which we are continuously building these 3 pillars. Read on to find out how this new funding will enable us to invest in each of them.

Strapi Cloud to build a frictionless Developer Experience

At StrapiConf 2022 back in February, we revealed our plans to launch a new product called Strapi Cloud to easily deploy, host, and scale your Strapi projects.

We chose a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) approach to embrace our open-source DNA and preserve Strapi’s unique customization capabilities. With Strapi Cloud we’re doubling down on the Developer Experience and offering a seamless deployment process that requires absolutely no DevOps skills. Developers will be able to start their project locally, customize it according to their needs, version it through Git, and deploy it in seconds.

General Availability is planned for 2023. In the meantime, we invite everyone interested in being a beta tester to join the waitlist.

Strapi Market to centralize a trusted ecosystem

A Headless CMS like Strapi is meant to be connected with other tools to unlock its full potential. Developers are breaking down monolithic architectures and leveraging building blocks that can be easily added or removed as needed. This not only helps businesses future-proof their applications and embrace more agile workflows, it also gives developers and content managers the freedom to choose their favorite tools and frameworks independently. That’s why, as Gartner puts it, the future of business and content management is composable.

Together with all the Strapi community members and contributors, we are unlocking the creation of a massive and open ecosystem. There are already more than 2,000 Strapi plugins and providers developed by Strapi users which represent more than 700K monthly downloads.

To find the best Strapi plugins and instantly add new features to your projects, we recently announced the launch of Strapi Market, the official marketplace listing all Strapi plugins and providers available.

As we speak, there are more than 80 plugins already on Strapi Market with more plugins being added every week.

Enabling collaboration over the entire Content Lifecycle

Although developers are playing an increasingly important role in the decision-making process of any CMS, the end-users are Content Editors. They should be able to operate in full autonomy without too many dependencies on development teams. The recent rise of no-code/low-code tools confirms this requirement which extends beyond the scope of a Headless CMS into what Gartner calls a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). In other words, making different types of content available on different devices is no longer enough. Companies need to think about the total experience for all stakeholders and embrace personalization, automation workflows, and content analytics.

At Strapi, our vision is to empower both Developers and Content editors to quickly build apps that enable collaboration and collective intelligence over the entire content lifecycle.

To that end, we plan on investing in the editing experience by working on the most highlighted problems such as improving the collaboration before publishing content, enhancing the writing experience with more Rich-Text Editors options, or reviewing the current Draft & Publish feature to manage content versions in parallel. All these new features will benefit from fine-tuned integrations with the existing features such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Content Internationalization.

By allowing users to add new fields (i.e map, videos, color picker, etc) to any content types, the upcoming Custom Fields feature will also provide a nicer display, enriched data, and make more actions readily available from the admin panel. It will also enable a new wave of plugins particularly useful to content editors such as integrations with personalization tools, visual builders, or Ecommerce solutions.

Strapi Cloud will also make Strapi even more accessible to non-technical users who will be able to leverage pre-built templates, easily preview content updates, and quickly set up new integrations with other services.

Thank you!

All of the milestones we achieved over the past two years, including this financing round, have been possible thanks to the amazing Strapi community, partners, customers, and team members. Thank you, so much, for all of your contributions!

The best is yet to come. We look forward to building even faster, together!

Join us

Strapi is made of caring, diverse, passionate, ambitious, and all-remote team members. Our public handbook has been created to document our values, and share more information about the team – who we are, how we work as a remote company with more than 70 employees located in more than 10+ countries.

We currently have a lot of job openings in Engineering and Sales. If you want to help us build the future of content management, join us full-time.

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