Today we are thrilled to announce our $4M Seed funding 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.
This funding boost will help deliver on our vision of making 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.
Before announcing what we have in the pipeline, let’s start with a little bit of history!
The story of Strapi
Who we are
When we met at University in 2013, Aurélien, Jim, and I, Pierre, were already passionate about the Internet and web development.
Like many programmers, we started building websites using traditional CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. They saved us an incredible amount of time.
More and more devices
After the emergence of the smartphone and the explosion in form factors and devices, the content game changed. It wasn’t just a question of responsive design, but of being able to present and consume content and data in a myriad of environments from sites, to apps, to smartwatches, etc. Instead of duplicating content management, it started to make sense to centralize and make it omnichannel.
JavaScript applications
At the same time, even website creation had also changed. We started seeing super-fast and AJAX-based sites, providing smooth user experiences. The word “web app” became a thing.
As a cause and consequence, the first front-end frameworks appeared. Angular 1 (do you remember the good old ng-repeat?) was one that broke all the rules. Developers became more and more full-stack and started dividing their projects into separate directories (e.g., API and client).
Front-End and Back-End divorced. The API was the only bridge between them.
The only concern was the SEO limitations (HTML pages were almost empty). This issue was quickly solved thanks to pre-rendering solutions and, later on, static website generators and server-side rendering. After that, nothing could stop the movement! The success of React and Vue.js provides the best evidence of that.
Tweaking traditional CMS into APIs
Traditional CMSs were built 15 years ago and were fine when we had to make a website. For that reason, their name should probably be “website builders” or “website managers.” But when we needed to build mobile applications, they were not the right tool. The only way to “APIfy” traditional CMSs was to hack them, and the result was always dirty, slow, and not customizable…
Strapi was born!
At that time, Node.js was already growing like crazy. Being PHP, Java, and JavaScript developers, we saw in JavaScript the opportunity to use only one language for both the front-end and the back-end. Since we were heavy users of open-source projects and because we already thought that a Headless CMS should be open-source, we published the project on GitHub in October 2015.
Frustrated by the limitations of traditional CMSs, we finally said: “Let’s create our own!”
First users, first GitHub stars, first pull-requests. What an amazing feeling!
From side project to open-source company
In 2016 we incorporated the company and developed a few projects with the software to battle test it. We learned so much from these use-cases that we decided to restart the project from scratch and publish the new version in October 2017.
Since then, the project has grown like crazy. Used by thousands of companies like IBM, Asos, and Walmart, Strapi finally became the #1 Open-Source Headless CMS.
What’s next
What does this fundraising mean for you? Only good news, that’s why we are so excited!
Providing the Headless CMS of your dream
Our primary focus is to provide the most requested features and enhance existing ones. Strapi will not only be easier to use but will also become even easier to deploy. Not only that, we will release the stable version.
For more information, please take a look at the public roadmap and upvote your most needed improvements.
Offering a seamless Developer Experience
For technical products, the documentation is always a critical part of the user experience. To render it more efficient, we will update the structure and add more guides to explain advanced usage, including customization and plugin development.
Through the brand new tutorial section of the website, everyone can now enjoy a growing number of tutorials and publish new ones.
Building a robust ecosystem
Strapi has been designed to be highly customizable and extensible through a powerful plugin system. This system will be finalized to make plugin development, publication, and updates seamless. That way, absolutely anyone can contribute and make the ecosystem bigger than we can imagine today!.
The aim of a Headless CMS is to be connected to clients, via a website, a mobile application, or even a fridge! We plan to offer a smooth experience while providing SDKs, integrations, and starters.
Growing the community
If you submitted a pull-request, tweeted about Strapi, or even if you recommended Strapi to one of your colleagues, you have already become part of the community.
As such, you participate by helping other users, improving the project, or passing the word around you to grow the ecosystem. We will provide more resources so you can easily organize events in your city, write tutorials, etc.
Business model
As an open-source company, we will have to make money at some point. In the future, we will start offering paid features for enterprise use-cases. We want to keep developer-oriented functionalities free while charging a small fee for business-oriented advanced features.
Whatever happens open-source will always stay open-source.
Our investors and advisors are firm believers in the open-source approach. Like you and us, they understand and approve the vision.
Thank you for believing in us!
All this would not have been possible without the help of the 250 people who have contributed to the project and the thousands of users who give us feedbacks every day, spreading the word and encouraging us. Thank you again to each of you for your fantastic contribution!
Thanks to our team for working so hard every single day and creating the great atmosphere we share!
And of course, we are also grateful to our investors who strongly believe in our vision.
