Hasura, a software company that speeds up web app development, announced on February 22 that it had raised $100 million from Greenoaks Capital at a valuation of $1 billion, demonstrating investor interest in pure software startups that burn less money and have a large market amid growing digitisation.
Hasura, founded by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh in 2017, reduces the time and skill necessary to create GraphQL APIs for data access. GraphQL is a query language that was created by Facebook and is open-source.
It makes APIs—software that allows apps to communicate with one another—more flexible and reduces app development time by automating repetitive activities and improving performance.
Two of the company’s current investors, Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners (US), also contributed. Hasura will become India’s eighth unicorn in 2022, a phrase for private technology enterprises worth more than a billion dollars.
Excited adoption is one of the best indicators of a strong developer experience. And there aren’t many companies like Hasura in this category. Hasura’s GraphQL engine has seen rapid adoption across a wide range of organisations, from small open-source initiatives to some of the world’s largest corporations, since its inception in 2018. “The common thread is increased developer productivity and a shorter time to market for mission-critical apps,” said Neil Shah, a partner at Greenoaks Capital.
Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal stated, “With this funding, Hasura will be able to significantly boost our innovation velocity, allowing us to deliver software even faster to our rapidly growing user base.”
Over the last few years, we’ve worked directly with our users and clients to close a huge gap in data delivery and consumption using an API standard that developers enjoy — GraphQL. With this fundraising round, “Our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our ambition to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity,” he added.
The purchase is also a gain for Nexus Venture Partners, an early investor whose successful software bets set it apart from other VC companies in India. Druva, Postman, and other software ventures are among the company’s most valuable investments.
