Nexus backed Hasura raises $25 Mn in Series B Funding

Hasura Raises $25mn in Series B funding, Brings Instant GraphQL to MySQL and SQL Server for Rapid API Development to Unlock Siloed Data

Hasura also announced $25 million in series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (US) with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.io Fund and new angel investors including John Thomspon, the current chairman of Microsoft, bringing the total raised to $36.5 million. Hasura is using the funding to accelerate its hiring and investment in its open source and commercial product development to support its millions of users.

“We’re very impressed by how developers have taken to Hasura and embraced the GraphQL approach to building applications. Particularly for front-end developers using technologies like React, Hasura makes it easy to connect applications to existing databases where all the data is without compromising on security and performance. Hasura provides a lovely bridge for replatforming applications to cloud-native approaches, so we see this approach being embraced by enterprise developers as well as front-end developers more and more,” said Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Hasura board member.

Hasura, the data access infrastructure company, today announced that it has added GraphQL support for MySQL and early access support for SQL Server to its existing support for PostgreSQL. Hasura now supports three of the most popular database technologies. A great deal of valuable data lives inside existing MySQL and SQL Server databases, and developers want to access that data to build new applications. By expanding its support to more database types, Hasura makes it easy for developers to access that data with a modern GraphQL-based API with inbuilt security, scalability and governance.

“Data lives in lots of places, and in many different databases. We want our users to be able to access that data instantly with Hasura’s secure, scalable data access infrastructure so adding support for MySQL and SQL Server was our obvious next step. It opens up huge potential for all the developers who need to access the vast amounts of data that lives in MySQL and SQL Server today. Now they can enjoy instant data access with a modern GraphQL API, and Hasura’s built-in security, governance and scalability features will get their applications into production quickly and safely,” said Hasura co-founder and CEO Tanmai Gopal.

Organizations already have data they want to use but it is trapped in silos. Rather than trying to use outdated approaches to overcome this problem like consolidating fast-moving operational data into static data warehouses or datalakes, Hasura provides a new option: simply connect applications by federating access to where the data lives, using a modern API-based approach that includes security, governance and scalability as standard features. With support for MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL, using Hasura means developers aren’t forced to migrate data to make it accessible from their applications.

Hasura’s ability to auto-generate modern, GraphQL based APIs and its built-in security, governance, and scalability features means developers can rapidly build applications that connect to data without waiting for costly, time-consuming infrastructure projects to finish building the pieces they need. Instead, they can concentrate on solving business problems with data and rapidly build and ship applications that add value to their organizations. The speed and flexibility provided by Hasura is truly transformative for organizations trapped in outdated ways of working.

Major Company Milestones

• 2017 Hasura was founded by Tanmai Gopal, CEO, and Rajoshi Ghosh, COO, to make access to data easier for application developers struggling with outdated approaches to API development. Hasura has made instant data access possible by auto-generating modern GraphQL APIs with in-built security, governance, and scalability. With secure, rapid access to data, time-to-market for applications reduced dramatically for developers using Hasura.
• 2018 Hasura announced $1.6 million in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners.
• 2018 Hasura released its popular open source GraphQL engine that connects to databases and microservices and auto-generates a production-ready GraphQL backend to accelerate product development of modern, data-driven applications. The product has tens of millions of downloads and more than 18,500 GitHub stars.
• 2018 Hasura joined the GraphQL Foundation as a founding member.
• 2020 Hasura announced $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US.
• 2020 Hasura released its on-premises version with enhanced enterprise features for security, scalability and compliance.
• 2020 Hasura released Hasura Cloud, a managed service that provides instant and secure access to data across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments with a unified GraphQL API. Hasura Cloud helps organizations create data-driven applications without costly investments in infrastructure or operational management. The service brings new cloud-specific functionality such as dynamic data caching, auto-scaling, global availability and consumption-based pricing.
• 2020 Hasura held its first user conference Hasura Con ‘20. The virtual conference had speakers from Airbus, Cherre, Credimi, General Assembly, GraphCMS, Krafteer, Lineup Ninja, Meow.vc, NuxtJS, Observable, OneGraph, Philips Healthcare, Prefect, RESULT, Swiggy, SZTAKI, Tarbh, The Chicago Reporter, The Guild, United Health and WorkClout.
• 2020 Hasura won API World’s Best in DevOps APIs award for being a leader in its sector for innovation and for its developer adoption.

About Hasura

Hasura is helping to build the modern world of globally relevant, data-driven applications and APIs. Hasura’s range of data access solutions helps organizations accelerate product delivery by instantly connecting data and services to applications with GraphQL APIs. For more information, go to: https://hasura.io or follow @HasuraHQ.

Nexus backed Hasura Raises $9.9 Mn in Funding led by Vertex Ventures US

Hasura, the San Francisco and Bangalore-based company providing data access and data flow tools and services via GraphQL APIs announced today that it has raised $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US. The round also saw participation from SAP.iO Fund, the early-stage venture arm of SAP, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. Several angels also participated, including James Tamplin (founder of Firebase), Sam Lambert (VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub), Amod Malvia (co-founder of Udaan, ex CTO Flipkart), and Michael Stoppelman (ex-SVP of Engineering at Yelp).

GraphQL has emerged as an API solution to accelerate product and data delivery and is beloved by API consumers and application developers. Hasura automatically generates a real-time GraphQL API using declarative metadata configuration and authorization policies that gives consumers instant use. Hasura’s event engine makes it easy to integrate cloud-native/serverless business logic to the GraphQL API. This allows organizations and teams to use GraphQL in production and mission-critical applications (alongside existing and modern cloud-native infrastructure) without the significant cost of building and maintaining a GraphQL server.

Building GraphQL APIs in enterprise (where a majority of use-cases are platform-centric and data-centric) has been challenging. It creates complexity for engineers who struggle to keep databases from being swamped by malformed queries which can cause outages and delays, not to mention security/privacy concerns.

Hasura’s technology, powered by a highly concurrent just-in-time compiler, can process GraphQL queries and efficiently map them into queries to multiple underlying systems (like SQL databases, REST APIs etc). This approach allows Hasura to perform user-given transformations, apply security policies and implement caching requirements in an efficient and scalable way that is cloud-native. Front end engineers, often the consumers of a GraphQL API, truly feel the power of ‘serverless’ design with GraphQL+Hasura. Hasura’s enterprise product also adds GraphQL API management and governance features, including monitoring, traffic management and testing, and integrations for SSO and APM vendors.

Stoplight, an API Design Management Platform, moved their boilerplate GraphQL and authorization into Hasura from their own GraphQL server. “Hasura has significantly reduced the time our engineers spend writing boilerplate GraphQL code. However, what really drove adoption of Hasura at Stoplight is the powerful and flexible permissions system it provides out of the box, and how easy it is to incrementally introduce to an existing tech stack,” said Marc MacLeod, Founder & CEO at Stoplight.



“Hasura’s out-of-the-box support for real-time data via GraphQL subscriptions, granular access-control system and support for geospatial data has dramatically accelerated our efforts to modernize our data access layer for internal API consumers,” says Dr. Andreas Sindlinger, Solution Architect at Jeppesen (A Boeing Company).

Hasura’s open-source traction and developer adoption has grown steadily, crossing over 28M downloads and 15k GitHub stars. The Hasura GraphQL engine was one of last year’s fastest-growing projects as per the 2019 JavaScript Rising Stars report. Hasura has seen widespread adoption across some of the world’s most exciting organizations, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, including some of the largest healthcare and financial services organizations.

“Hasura makes it possible for front-end teams to use GraphQL and move fast without breaking things on the back-end,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US. “We invested because of the incredible velocity of their product engineering, the tremendous community the founders built in such short order, and the pull from enterprises who want to empower their engineers to move with FAANG-like agility while supporting ops teams with performance management, security, and data access.”

With this funding, Hasura will invest heavily in engineering and product development, notably providing more ready-made integrations with databases and other data sources, in addition to hiring across sales and marketing.

“Hasura has an amazing fit with Postgres and the Postgres vendor ecosystem including new age distributed SQL Postgres vendors,” said Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura. “While we double down on the Postgres ecosystem, these funds will help us bring the Hasura and GraphQL experience to other databases to mobilize data in organizations by making high-performance and secure data access a reality.”

Meet the Winners of Facebook's First Ever India Startup Day

On Tuesday, social networking giant Facebook hosted first ever India Startup Day, wherein the company also hosted India Startup Awards to recognize some of the most path-breaking work of India's disruptive startup ecosystem and awarded winners in five categories -- 1) She Leads Tech, 2) Building for the World, 3) Building for Tomorrow, 4) Building for the Next Billion, and 5) Community Builder.

The winners of these five categories are -

She Leads Tech

The 'She Leads Tech' category of awards was given recognize the most successful tech startup launched and or led by a woman founder or co-founder.

[caption id="attachment_126655" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Neha Juneja, Co-Founder and CEO, Greenway Grameen
[Image - Youtu.be/pvzCNcSk40o][/caption]

Winner: Greenway Grameen - A Mumbai-based green technology startup that designs and distributes life-improving products amongst low-income markets. The startup is an incubatee company of IIM Ahmadabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE). In 2015, the startup had set up India's largest manufacturing unit for biomass cook stoves in Vadodara, Gujarat.

Founded in 2011 by Neha Juneja along with Ankit Mathur, Greenway has sold about 8 lakh units of its biomass stoves made of steel and aluminum that emit 70 percent less smoke and consume about 50 percent less fuel than conventional mud variants across India and South America. The company clocked ₹25 crore in revenue in FY17. It even started selling solar-powered products such as lamps and a dish antenna service in 2017.

Building for the World

The 'Building for the World' was given to recognize a company that has seen success outside India and are working on solutions that are being used on a global scale.

[caption id="attachment_126658" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Nasofilters [Image- asia.nikkei.com][/caption]

Winner: Nanoclean - An IIT-Delhi alumni startup that produces affordable bio safe nanofibers with its proprietary polymer technology. IN May last year, we reported about Nanocleans first ever product called NasoFilter, which is a nasal filter that can restrict the entry of harmful particles into the body at a mere cost of just Rs. 10 rupees each.

The startup has been awarded Start-ups National Award 2017 by the Technology Development Board for creating a promising new technology with potential for commercialization.

Building for Tomorrow

Winer: Scapic - A platform that lets people create, share and explore immersive experiences and helps users to build Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality content easily.

Building for Tomorrow award was given recognize a startup using emerging technologies such as AR/VR to reinvent how business and society can come up with solutions.

Building for the Next Billion

The award for 'Building for the Next Billion' is to recognize startups developing and implementing solutions for social, cultural and environmental issues in India.

[caption id="attachment_126659" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The team at AYE [Image - YourStory.com][/caption]

Winner: Aye Finance - A Gurgaon headquartered startup, Aye Finance has a mission of transforming micro and small enterprise lending in India by providing inclusive finance at affordable price to this 'missing middle'. Interestingly, CapitalG, the venture capital fund owned by Google'a parent Alphabet Inc., had invested in Aye Finance in June this year.

Founded in 2016 by Sanjay and Vikram Jetley, Aye Finance is an NBFC that provides mortgage, hypothecation, and term loan services to the small and micro enterprises. Last month, Aye Finance has been shortlisted in 10 companies selected globally by Google for its flagship development acceleration programme "Launchpad Studio"

Community Builder

The Community Builder award is to recognize startups that are building solutions to support the developer startup community in India

[caption id="attachment_126661" align="aligncenter" width="673"] Team Hasua [Image - Hasura@Facebook][/caption]

Winner: Hasura - A platform that helps developers build, develop and scale their apps. It has instant APIs for rapid development, and it helps create a to-do app within three minutes.

Founded in by Tanmai Gopal, Anand Raj and Rajoshi Ghosh, Hasura had raised $1.6 million seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, in April this year.


[Top Featured Image - Team of Nasofilters | Credit - Nasofilters.com]