GraphQL data wrangler Hasura bags $100m investment

25,000 GitHub stars since its introduction in 2017

Hasura, which provides tools for the GraphQL data language, has pulled in $100m funding that gives it a nominal valuation of $1bn.

VC Greenoaks led the round with Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures chipping in. The Series C funding more than quadruples the total capital raised by the fledgling startup to $136.5m.

The cash is to be invested in R&D and to expand Hansura's go-to-market activities globally for the company's GraphQL Engine, a low-code approach to composing a GraphQL API from existing APIs and databases.

Hasura has been downloaded more than 400 million times and has earned more than 25,000 GitHub stars since its introduction in 2017, the company said.

Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks, said in a pre-canned quote: "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. Now, Hasura Cloud has taken this a step further, truly democratising GraphQL."

GraphQL was created at Facebook in 2012, released as an open-source project three years later, and has become viewed as a more capable alternative to REST in terms of moving data. In November 2019, the GraphQL project was moved from Facebook to the GraphQL Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Both REST and GraphQL provide ways to request data over HTTP, but GraphQL allows for greater flexibility with requests that are more like database queries.

Founded in 2017, Hasura launched a REST API Connector in December last year. It is designed to remove the need to write custom code to connect existing REST endpoints into their unified GraphQL API by providing an API transformation system.

At the same time, Hasura also launched Data Hub, a repository of API integrations it says would allow developers to easily connect APIs from developer platforms – starting out with Contentful, Elastic, Fauna, and IBM Open API – to their GraphQL APIs.

The idea is to give frontend developers access to a range of data through one API endpoint, Hasura co-founder and COO Rajoshi Ghosh told The Register.

Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst at ESG, said at the time the one-click REST API for GraphQL would help the development of new applications and integration of old ones.

The new funding may also help with one of Hasura's challenges. According to Nashawaty, it will aim to continue to grow integrations with its data hub services and expand across the partner ecosystem. "This is not an easy task as the partner ecosystem is very large. Delivering a data hub that only partially addresses integration may fall short of customers' expectations," he said.

Meanwhile, the competition is also accruing funding. Apollo GraphQL has just snagged investment from MongoDB Ventures Investment Fund, although it did not say how much. The database-linked fund also invested in BigID, a data intelligence platform. ®