Stockholm-based data platform for developers Grafbase has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Next47, The round saw participation from Alven, Uncorrelated Ventures, and a group of 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. The startup managed to reach $7.3 million in seed funding in total. Founded by Fredrik Björk, former CTO of The RealReal and angel investor, Grafbase is a data platform for developers that accelerates backend deployment via serverless GraphQL APIs. The company will double down on becoming the standard to deploy globally fast backends and expand its team.
“Building and deploying backends has been complex and time-consuming for years. We have built Grafbase to make deployment of GraphQL backends seamless and blazingly fast. With Grafbase, developers can create a GraphQL endpoint with a complete backend, including API and database. All projects deployed to Grafbase come with a serverless database that is seamlessly integrated with 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.”
Tackling the $13.6B global market for Cloud Database and Database-as-a-Service, Grafbase 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, hundreds 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.
Before founding Grafbase, Swedish-born Fredrik Björk (who started coding at the age of 9) was the CTO at The RealReal (Nasdaq: REAL, IPO 2019). 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 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 7-second global deployment, of data together with applications, that have response times of less than 100ms worldwide.”
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