Hasura, designed to make application and API development faster than ever, recently announced that it raised $100 million in financing from Greenoaks. The valuation of the startup now amounts to $1 billion. The existing investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures were also a part of the financing round. The platform offered by the startup creates GraphQL APIs from existing databases which ultimately makes it easier to create a new app or add features to an existing one.
Facebook developed GraphQL internally and later transferred the ownership to the Linux Foundation. The need for a tool that can make language usage emerged from several startups including Hasura. Traditional databases are based on SQL, Structured Query Language, which is complicated. GraphQL is a simplified mechanism that presents queries to a database. Its simplicity makes it easier to craft queries that can traverse complex data structures.
Hasura was founded in 2017 by Rajoshi Ghosh and CEO Tanmai Gopal and has its headquarters in San Francisco and Bangalore, India. Since then, the startup is making application and API development faster than ever. The platform eliminates the bottlenecks to data access for frontend and full-stack developers. Not just this, it reduces the time and niche expertise required to build GraphQL APIs for data access. All this is done by automating the repetitive work involved in mapping models to APIs. It even creates granular authorization along with the security policies and offers common access patterns. GraphQL API is created via an event engine. It replaces direct database access with a more scalable and secure API. Hasura initially open-sourced its software and to date, it has hired thousands of developers to make billions of API calls. The latest funding will bring in 107 employees. Hasura’s total raise now amounts to over $136.5 million. As stated by Gopal, CEO of Hasura, the startup will be put toward expanding the workforce, investing more in product R&D, and focusing on customer acquisition efforts.
