Headless CMS company Strapi raises another $10 million

Published May 20, 2020

Strapi, the company behind the popular open-source headless CMS also called Strapi, has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Index Ventures. The company previously raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc in October 2019.

Strapi is a headless content management system, which means that the back end and the front end operate totally separately. You can run Strapi on your own server and write content and pages for your site by connecting to Strapi’s admin interface.

After that, the front-end part of your application can fetch content from your Strapi instance using an API and display it to your customers and readers.

There are many advantages in separating the front end from the back end. First, it gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to displaying your content. You can use a popular front-end framework, such as React, Vue and Angular, or develop your own custom front end.

When you want to update the design of your site, you can just switch from one front end to another with Strapi running like usual behind the scene.

Similarly, it offers more flexibility when it comes to server architecture. For instance, you could also leverage Strapi to build static websites and distribute them using a content delivery network, such as Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront. You could imagine using Gatsby combined with a CDN to deploy your site on the edge. Most of your traffic will go through your CDN instead of hitting your servers directly.

Additionally, Strapi can be used to distribute content to different front ends. For instance, you could use a Strapi instance for the content of your website and your mobile app.

Strapi proves that eventually everything becomes an API. Sure, a headless CMS is probably overkill for most projects. But if you’re running a large-scale application, Strapi can fit nicely in your architecture. Companies using Strapi include IBM, NASA and Walmart.

Many well-known open-source business angels have also invested in Strapi, such as Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino from Kong, David Cramer from Sentry, Florian Douetteau from Dataiku, Solomon Hykes from Docker, Guillermo Rauch from Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co, and Eli Collins from Cloudera.

Headless CMS company Strapi raises $4 million

Published October 15, 2019

French startup Strapi has raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc. The company has been working on an open-source Node.js headless content management system.

That’s a lot of technical words in a row, but it’s not that hard to understand what Strapi is. Content management systems, or CMS, are web applications that let you publish and manage content on a website. It can be a blog, a corporate website with multiple pages, a portfolio, etc. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress.

Over the past few years, many companies and developers have started to separate the CMS back end (the administration pages where you write and upload content) and the front end (the public website accessible to anyone).

This way, you can run a CMS in the back end, and develop your own custom front end that queries the back end using API calls — this is what’s called a headless CMS. It provides a ton of flexibility and should make your website faster. This is how TechCrunch.com works for instance, with WordPress running as a headless CMS.

Strapi has become quite popular in the headless CMS space, with 500,000 downloads and 250 contributors to the open-source project. The first version was released on GitHub in 2015.

Anybody can download Strapi and run it on their own server. You can then develop your front end, fetch content in your mobile app using the Strapi API and more. Strapi lets you customize the admin panel so that you only see the fields you need when you add content. It works with SQLite, MongoDB, MySQL and Postgres databases.

The company plans to build an ecosystem of plugins to expand the features of your CMS installation. Eventually, the startup could launch a hosted version of Strapi so you don’t have to manage the server infrastructure yourself.

Solomon Hykes, Guillermo Rauch and Eli Collins are also participating in today’s round. Existing investors include Bpifrance, SGPA, François-Charles Debeunne, Jean-Philippe Bellaiche, Kima Ventures, Nicolas Debock, Patrick Dalsace and Nicolas Rosset.