Strapi Raised $31 Million in Series B Funding for Open Source CMS

Strapi, a renowned open source content management system (CMS), revealed it has garnered $31 million in Series B funding. The latest round was led by CRV with participation from Flex Capital, Index Ventures, and notable angel investors including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. With this boost in capital, Strapi aims to launch a new product called Strapi Cloud, expand its technological capabilities, foster additional tech and solution partnerships, and continue the development of the Strapi project.

The concept of Strapi emerged when founders Pierre Burgy, Aurélien Georget, and Jim Laurie worked together as freelance developers during their time in college. Dissatisfied with the constraints posed by traditional frameworks and CMS platforms, which were not designed with mobile-first applications in mind, the team decided to create a CMS solution of their own, Strapi, to be used in their clients' projects.

In 2015, Burgy, Georget, and Laurie took the bold step of publishing Strapi on GitHub. As Burgy explains, making the project open source was ultimately a no-brainer for the team: “We were using lots of open source software, and we were convinced that collaboration would lead to better software. Most of our clients wanted to host their CMS on their own servers; customization capabilities were only possible through source-code access.”

Initially, Strapi acted as a hybrid between a framework for building APIs and a CMS. Its name, creatively derived from the term “Bootstrap your API,” reflects its foundation. Presently, Strapi allows developers to establish and manage multiple databases, front-end frameworks, and static site generators. Users can run Strapi on a server and access its admin interface while utilizing the front end to extract content from Strapi via an API.

Strapi aims to address the issues that legacy CMS software often falls short of, such as adaptability to tailor-made use cases. Competing with platforms like Contentful, Storyblok, and Sanity, Strapi recently introduced Strapi Market, a library featuring integrations with numerous third-party platforms to enhance its capabilities. The Strapi team is also concentrating on improving the content-editing experience, developing pre-built templates, publication workflows, customizable fields, rich text editors, and a range of plugins for e-commerce, personalization, and visualization.

Work on Strapi Cloud, a fully managed Strapi service, is already in progress. This service will enable customers to create projects locally, customize them to fit their requirements, and deploy them onto the web. The fully managed Strapi service is currently in beta and scheduled for general availability next year.

Strapi has already made its mark among thousands of open source users and boasts more than 450 paying customers, including significant players like AT&T, eBay, IBM, and Toyota, as well as government agencies across the U.S. and Europe. In terms of workforce size, the company currently employs 70 staff members, with a projected growth to 110 by the end of the year. With its latest funding round, Strapi has raised a total of $45 million.

As businesses increasingly shift online due to the pandemic, the demand for versatile and comprehensive platform solutions has grown exponentially. Strapi aims to meet this demand by providing a flexible and composable platform that can future-proof applications, ensuring compatibility with evolving industry trends. Its open-source approach serves to streamline application development for users, inclusive of solutions ranging from websites to native mobile applications. ApplMaster.io, a powerful no-code platform, follows a similar path, making application development faster and more cost-effective for a wide range of customers: from small businesses to enterprise-level clients. AppMaster.io offers a seamless process for creating backend, web, and mobile applications, eliminating technical debt by generating applications from scratch every time requirements change.