A Swedish data platform for developers, Grafbase, has raised $5 million in seed funding in a round led by Next47 (which backed Zesty and Wandelbots), a global VC firm investing in category-defining B2B companies. The investment round also saw participation from Alven (which raised €350M and backed recently Bearer), Uncorrelated Ventures, and a group of renowned angel investors including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann Christensen, and Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, among others.
Plans to accelerate product development
With the fresh investment, the total funding raised by the company reaches $7.3 million. Grafbase intends to use the funds to accelerate its product development and double the size of the team. Grafbase is a remote-first company distributed across Europe and the US and is available for developers now.
“Building and deploying backends has been complex and time-consuming for years. We have built Grafbase to make the deployment of GraphQL backends seamless and blazingly fast. With Grafbase, developer teams can create a GraphQL endpoint with a complete backend, including application(s) and database. All projects deployed to Grafbase come with a globally replicated serverless database that is seamlessly integrated into every GraphQL API. This way, backend projects scale from zero to enterprise making it cost-effective at any scale,” said Fredrik Björk, Founder & CEO at Grafbase. “We’re glad to win such renowned and like-minded investors to back our mission.”
“Grafbase is at the heart of two powerful trends: GraphQL and building applications at the edge,” said Micah Smurthwaite, Partner at Next47. “There are millions of GraphQL developers and the Graph is changing how companies build software. Distributed networks, such as Cloudflare Workers, are allowing developers to build applications at the edge, closer to the end user. With Grafbase, developers can create a single GraphQL endpoint with a fully-featured backend that is replicated at the edge, globally. That’s very powerful and is changing how software is built.”
“The speed at which the team has been shipping code and new features has been very impressive, and Fredrik assembled a top-notch team of a quality we very rarely see at this stage of development,” said Thomas Cuvelier, partner at Alven.
“I’ve been surprised by GraphQL’s rise as the lingua franca for not only querying graph databases, but also middleware, system integration, APIs, and really any interactions with and among applications,” said Salil Deshpande, General Partner at Uncorrelated Ventures. “The timing was perfect for Grafbase to leverage GraphQL, cloud data services, and standard CDNs, to enable the 7-second global deployment, of data together with applications, that have response times of less than 100ms worldwide.”
Instant serverless GraphQL backends
Before founding Grafbase in 2020, Swedish-born Fredrik Björk was the CTO at The RealReal. Previously, he was the founder and CTO of Avatars United, a social network for the metaverse that was acquired by Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) in 2010.
Grafbase accelerates backend development with next-generation tooling. It deploys globally fast GraphQL APIs with a top-notch developer experience. Tackling the $13.6 billion global market for Cloud Database and Database-as-a-Service, the company enables developers to go from idea to production in seconds without spending time on infrastructure.
Since Grafbase was launched in beta to the developer community in early August, thousands of projects have already been created with a growing community forming in Discord. Some early adopters are building mobile, e-commerce, and Jamstack backends already.
