SaaS start-up Hasura enters unicorn club with $100 mn Series C funding

Greenoaks-led round will be used to expand R&D and go-to-market activities for GraphQL

Software-as-a-service startup Hasura has raised $100 million in funding at a valuation of $1 billion. The Series C round brings the total capital raised by Hasura to $136.5 million.

The funding round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures.

The platform is designed to make web application development faster by eliminating bottlenecks to data access for frontend and fullstack developers. The platform cuts down the time and niche expertise required to build GraphQL-based APIs for data access by automating the repetitive work involved in mapping models to APIs with common access patterns like pagination, filtering, joining, setting up authorisation rules, and optimizing performance.

Hasura has been downloaded more than 400 million times and has earned more than 25,000 GitHub stars since its inception in 2018.

The company plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development and expand go-to-market activities globally for the company’s GraphQL engine, which makes it fast and easy for even those with zero GraphQL expertise to compose a GraphQL API from existing APIs and databases.

“There are few better signs of a powerful developer experience than enthusiastic adoption. And on this count, there aren’t many companies like Hasura,” said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks.

“Since the launch of their GraphQL engine in 2018, Hasura has witnessed explosive uptake across countless organisations, from grassroots open source projects, to some of the largest companies in the world. The common thread is substantial improvements in developer productivity and decreased time to market for mission-critical applications,” he added.

With operational data increasingly distributed among multiple sources and developers consuming data in insecure and unauthorised compute environments, Hasura provides data APIs that are able to connect to multiple services and data sources, embed domain-specific authorisation logic, and provide the necessary security and performance.

“This funding enables Hasura to greatly increase our innovation velocity, which in turn allows our rapidly-expanding user base to deliver software even faster,” said Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal.

“Over the last few years, we’ve worked closely with our users and customers to address a massive gap in delivering and consuming data via an API standard that developers love – GraphQL. With this funding round, our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our vision to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity,” she added.