Paris’ Strapi Lands $10M Series A To Expand Team Globally

Open source content management system startup Strapi landed $10 million in its Series A round.

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Strapi, a spin on “bootstrap your API,” started as a school project by CEO Pierre Burgy, chief product officer Aurélien Georget and chief technical officer Jim Laurie roughly five years ago in France. The company’s open source “headless” CMS provides backend functionality for applications and gives developers the freedom to use the tools of their choice for frontend frameworks. It’s called “headless” because the frontend is not part of the CMS, but there’s an API for content to show up on different devices.

The company wants to become the “defacto headless CMS,” according to Burgy. A headless CMS makes sense because many companies have a website and an app and want to display content on multiple platforms, Burgy said.

“There are more and more devices where the content has to be displayed and as this new architecture that separates the front end from the back end becomes more and more popular…it offers a lot of possibilities because the content is managed only once and then displayed on different channels,” Burgy said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

With the new funding, which was led by Index Ventures, the company will focus on growing its community, earning revenue (it plans on introducing its first paid feature in July), and expanding its team.

Strapi announced its $4 million seed round with Accel and Stride.VC in October 2019 and planned to raise more money at the end of 2020. But Index, which Strapi started a relationship with about a year ago, contacted the company in January and the process took four days, according to Burgy. Strapi signed the term sheet in the beginning of February and the Series A closed in early April.

Notable angel investors for the Series A include Kong CEO Augusto Marietti, Kong CTO Marco Palladino and Sentry co-founder and CTO David Cramer.

Strapi plans to use the funding to double its team and have about 40 employees by next May. The Paris-based company will also be opening an office in San Francisco. Its marketing and sales teams will be in the United States, while the product developers and designers will be based in Europe, though the company is open to remote employees.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias