Nexus-backed open source start-up Hasura turns unicorn; raises $100 mn

Open source start-up Hasura on Tuesday announced that it has raised $100 million in fresh funding round at a valuation of $1 billion. The Series C funding round was led by Greenoaks with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures, it said.

With this, the start-up now joins the league of other unicorns in the country. "The funding round brings the total capital raised by Hasura to $136.5 million and the company’s valuation to $1 billion," the company said in a statement.

The term “unicorn” describes a privately-owned startup with a valuation of over $1 billion. The term was introduced by venture capital investor, Aileen Lee, in 2013 to describe rare tech startups that were valued at more than $1 billion.

Hasura, in a statement, added that the company "plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development and expand go-to-market activities globally for the company’s GraphQL Engine, which makes it fast and easy for even those with zero GraphQL expertise to compose a GraphQL API from existing APIs and databases."

“This funding enables Hasura to greatly increase our innovation velocity, which in turn allows our rapidly-expanding user base to deliver software even faster,” said Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal, adding, "With this funding round, our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our vision to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity."

Hasura has been downloaded more than 400 million times and has more than 25,000 GitHub stars since its introduction in 2018. It is designed to make web application development faster than ever before by eliminating bottlenecks to data access for frontend and fullstack developers. The platform cuts down the time and niche expertise required to build GraphQL APIs for data access by automating the repetitive work involved in mapping models to APIs with common access patterns like pagination, filtering, joining, setting up authorization rules, and optimizing performance.

The company provides data APIs that are able to connect to multiple services and data sources, embed domain-specific authorization logic, and provide the necessary security and performance/concurrency.

“Since the launch of their GraphQL engine in 2018, Hasura has witnessed explosive uptake across countless organizations, from grassroots open source projects, to some of the largest companies in the world... We are thrilled to partner with Hasura as they become a core primitive for building cloud-native applications," said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks.