Nexus Venture Partners Led $1.6 Mn Funding In Dev Tools Startup Hasura

Bengaluru and San Francisco based developer tools startup Hasura has raised $1.6 Mn in a Seed round of funding led by Nexus Venture Partners along with GREE Ventures.

The startup plans to use these funds to accelerate product development to make sure its offerings continue to remain on the cutting edge, and to strengthen its marketing and developer relations teams, as shared by Rajoshi Ghosh, COO, Hasura in a media statement.

Long Story Short

As mentioned on the startup’s blog, Rajoshi and Tanmai Gopal started off wanting to build a food delivery marketplace. In the process and to save himself time and effort, Tanmai ended up creating a backend and devops toolkit christened ‘Procrust.es’.

Soon developers started enquiring, and asking if it were possible for them to use procrust.es themselves. Rajoshi and Tanmai were convinced to pivot, and procrust.es itself underwent several iterations to eventually became Hasura. and was launched officially 18 months back.

The name Hasura comes from a portmanteau of Asura, the Sanskrit word for demon, and Haskell. Asura refers to daemons, or computer programs that run as background processes. Haskell is the functional programming language used to build Hasura in.

The Hasura platform gives developers an extremely high-performance data layer (GraphQL and JSON), API gateway with authentication middleware, and GitOps automation. Hasura also provisions Kubernetes clusters on different cloud-vendors in a single command for developers and allows complete porting of a application from one cloud-vendor to another automatically.

In essence, it offers a kind of DIY kit which allows developers to easily build their codes for all sorts of applications.

“We at Nexus believe Kubernetes is going to change the way applications are being built and redefine DevOps boundaries and tooling. Using Hasura’s platform, developers can now create cloud-native, portable and “elastic” applications within a few minutes without knowing anything about Kubernetes in the beginning,” said Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners.

Hasura: Changing Developer’s World With Its Kubernetes Expertise

As per a simple Wikipedia definition, Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications that was originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”.

“Ultimately, containers and Kubernetes are just details on the road to helping teams build, iterate and maintain with maximum agility. Creating an environment for developers to collaborate, build and iterate rapidly without compromising on their ability to control lower layers of the stack is a powerful value proposition in the cloud-native landscape,” added Nikhil Kapur, Principal, GREE.

Hasura is a certified Kubernetes provider and a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Hasura also recently open-sourced a portion of their work in this space, Gitkube, a standalone Kubernetes component that allows developers to git push to deploy on their Kubernetes cluster. It picked up over a 1000 stars on github within a few days of its release.

Tanmai Gopal, CEO, Hasura further explains that if a fullstack developer learns how to write a Dockerfile and the basics of Kubernetes they can take complete control of their stack, end to end. They can build, deploy, operate and scale their microservices application to millions of users entirely by themselves.

This has the potential to completely change the dynamic everywhere applications are built, from indie projects, to startups to Fortune 500 companies. At present, Hasura platform is used by over 35,000 developers.

“We were one of the earliest adopters of Docker & Kubernetes in the world and we’ve been running Kubernetes clusters for application developers across all the major cloud providers. Our team’s DNA at its core is to create magic for developers and we’re going to lead the charge in accelerating how cloud-native applications are built,” added Tanmai.