Nexus Backed Hasura Raises $9.9mn In Series A Funding

Hasura, the San Francisco and Bangalore-based company providing data access and data flow tools and services via GraphQL APIs announced today that it has raised $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US. The round also saw participation from SAP.iO Fund, the early-stage venture arm of SAP, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. Several angels also participated, including James Tamplin (founder of Firebase), Sam Lambert (VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub), Amod Malvia (co-founder of Udaan, ex CTO Flipkart), and Michael Stoppelman (ex-SVP of Engineering at Yelp). 

GraphQL has emerged as an API solution to accelerate product and data delivery and is beloved by API consumers and application developers. Hasura automatically generates a real-time GraphQL API using declarative metadata configuration and authorization policies that gives consumers instant use. Hasura’s event engine makes it easy to integrate cloud-native/serverless business logic to the GraphQL API. This allows organizations and teams to use GraphQL in production and mission-critical applications (alongside existing and modern cloud-native infrastructure) without the significant cost of building and maintaining a GraphQL server. 

Building GraphQL APIs in enterprise (where a majority of use-cases are platform-centric and data-centric) has been challenging. It creates complexity for engineers who struggle to keep databases from being swamped by malformed queries which can cause outages and delays, not to mention security/privacy concerns.  

Hasura’s technology can process GraphQL queries and efficiently map them into queries to multiple underlying systems (like SQL databases, REST APIs, etc). This approach allows Hasura to perform user-given transformations, apply security policies and implement caching requirements in an efficient and scalable way that is cloud-native. Front end engineers, often the consumers of a GraphQL API, truly feel the power of ‘serverless’ design with GraphQL+Hasura. Hasura’s enterprise product also adds GraphQL API management and governance features, including monitoring, traffic management, and testing, and integrations for SSO and APM vendors. 

Stoplight, an API Design Management Platform, moved their boilerplate GraphQL and authorization into Hasura from their own GraphQL server. “Hasura has significantly reduced the time our engineers spend writing boilerplate GraphQL code. However, what really drove adoption of Hasura at Stoplight is the powerful and flexible permissions system it provides out of the box, and how easy it is to incrementally introduce to an existing tech stack,” said Marc MacLeod, Founder & CEO at Stoplight.