It took five years after receiving seed funding of $1.2 million for Hasura to turn into a unicorn. In Series C funding led by Greenoaks, the GraphQL innovation leader raised $100 million, eventually making Hasura a $1 billion company.
The Bangalore-based company, which has its office in Silicon Valley, witnessed a massive surge when there were 2 million downloads in the first year since its launch.
Not only among early-stage open-source projects but also some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it was gaining traction.
What unanimously worked in favor of Hasura was the platform providing an improvement in developer productivity and a lower time to market for critical applications. It has built a community around it over the years, allowing anyone to quickly and easily access their data.
With more than 400 million downloads, Hasura has bagged more than 25,000 GitHub stars since its launch in 2018.
What does Hasura do?
The open-source GraphQL engine Hasura aids in building data-driven applications and APIs. It instantly helps to set up a strong backend support system that is scalable. It allows a company to quickly connect data and services to applications using GraphQL APIs, allowing them to deliver products faster.
It makes a team more agile as the niche expertise needed to create GraphOL APIs for data access is reduced. It automates the repetitive work involved in mapping models to APIs.
How did Hasura come into existence?
Strangely, the journey started with a hunt for a wholesome meal when Rajoshi, co-founder of Hasura had to rely heavily on the existing food networking platforms and found that there was a dearth of healthy homemade food.
Tanmai the CEO of Hasura who had by then rejected lucrative offers from corporate and academia and had business ideas in search of a business partner, decided to take this head-on and started a homemade food delivery startup.
They focused more on building the apps themselves because they had a deep understanding of machine learning and the like, and that’s how the founders became acquainted with the app development ecosystem.
The system’s flaws were readily apparent. The more they looked into it, the more they realized there was a need for it, and it was then that it occurred to them that the application development process could be made a lot easier.
The first outcome of the effort to simplify application development was the gifting of a platform named procrust.es. It was a database platform that enabled the developers to focus more on the client’s side of the application without worrying about maintaining consistency with the ever-changing database.
When multiple developers from Chennai rushed to their office, they realized the uproar they had caused in the application development ecosystem, and they abandoned their food delivery startup dream in favor of focusing on core technology.
Procrust.es went through several iterations and 34 Cross followed. 34 Cross was a product development and consulting firm. It was a transitional phase for the founders at 34 Cross, where they helped Fortune 500 companies move to micro-services. While building on automation tools for clients at 34 Cross, the seedlings of Hasura were planted.
The founders of Hasura
Tanmai Gopal, the CEO, and co-founder of Hasura has an integrated dual degree of B. Tech and M. Tech in Computer Science and is an alumnus of IIT Madras. A serial entrepreneur who believed in building his venture has co-founded Brass Plate, Owlink, and 34 Cross before Hasura.
Rajoshi Ghosh, the COO, and co-founder of Hasura is a graduate of the National University of Singapore in Computational Biology. In her first job, she had been creating biodiesel from green algae but soon realized that her heart lay elsewhere in the startup ecosystem.
She was a Teaching Fellow at Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Accra, Ghana. She co-founded Dokbuk during her first stint in a startup, a platform for doctor’s appointments in the Indian and Singapore markets. Later, she went on to co-found Brass Plate, Owlink, and 34 Cross before co-founding Hasura.
Way to the Unicorn Club
Hasura has raised a total of $136.5 million in four rounds from 12 investors, with Vertex Ventures and STRIVE to be the most recent in the building blocks, with their latest fundraising in Series C on February 22nd, 2022.
Hasura’s first fund was $1.6 million in a seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners on April 25th, 2018. Vertex Ventures led the $9.9 million fundraising on February 26, 2020.
In Series B funding, a voluminous amount of $25 million was raised, which was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners. Finally, in the Series C round on February 22nd, 2022, a whopping sum of $100 million was raised, led by Greenoaks and co-led by Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures, taking the net worth of the company to $1 billion and making it a unicorn.
The funds raised in Series C are more to be utilized in research and development. The fund will aid in Hasura’s innovation velocity, thus focusing on the expansion of go-to-market activities globally for the Hasura GraphQL Engine, making it faster and easier even for those who are not SMEs on GraphQL and helping them develop a GraphQL API from existing APIs and databases.
Conclusion
The journey is unique and true to its name. Born to enable developers to access data, the passionate team and its active community leave no stone unturned when it comes to product development. With the zeal to focus on research and development for new products, CEO Tanmai Gopal rightly says that it’s important to strike a delicate balance between being flexible and staying stubborn for a big kill.
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