Nexus-Backed Hasura Raises $9.9 Mn In Series A Funding

San Francisco and Bengaluru-based Hasura has raised $9.9 Mn 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).

Earlier, the company raised $1.6 Mn funding from Nexus Venture Partners in April 2018. With this funding, Hasura will invest heavily in engineering and product development, notably providing more ready-made integrations with databases and other data sources, in addition to hiring across sales and marketing.

Led by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh, Hasura provides data access and data flow tools and services via GraphQL APIs, a solution to accelerate product and data delivery. The company’s technology automatically creates realtime GraphQL APIs, granting customers instant access to their data via secure APIs. This helps developers to solve the problems around connecting to databases.

For the novice, GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. It was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015.

The platform automatically generates a real-time GraphQL API using declarative metadata configuration and authorisation policies that gives consumers instant use. As claimed by the company, Hasura’s open-source traction and developer adoption crossed over 28 Mn downloads and 15K GitHub stars till date.

Why GraphQL APIs Are Important For Enterprises?

In simple terms, GraphQL is a syntax that describes how to ask for data and is generally used to load data from a server to a client. It lets the client specify exactly what data it needs and makes it easier to aggregate data from multiple sources.

Building GraphQL APIs in enterprises (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. It’s enterprise product also adds GraphQL API management and governance features, including monitoring, traffic management and testing, and integrations for SSO and APM vendors.

“Hasura makes it possible for front-end teams to use GraphQL and move fast without breaking things on the back-end,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US. “We invested because of the incredible velocity of their product engineering, the tremendous community that the founders built in such short order, and the pull from enterprises who want to empower their engineers to move with FAANG-like agility while supporting ops teams with performance management, security, and data access.”

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