Reflecting on the past year, it has been a remarkable journey for us. We raised a Series B investment, launched innovative features, onboarded new customers and partners, and grew our team with experienced industry leaders.
Keeping up with the tradition, here is a synopsis of all that we accomplished this year and our plans for the next.
#Highlights of the year
Series B
Earlier in March, we raised a $30M Series B investment round led by One Peak to accelerate the next generation of content management for the era of composable architectures.
The Series B funding has helped support our ongoing platform innovation and scale the company's growth.
Upcoming new interface
We recently unveiled our plans for the new Hygraph interface.
This is designed for optimum performance, with a more intuitive user interface and numerous new features.
Here's what this new experience will offer:
- Improved performance: It is designed to perform faster, with a smoother and hassle-free user experience.
- Quicker enhancements in the future: With better maintainability, it will allow us to launch new features and improvements much quicker.
- New features: It will include Field Outlines, a new Command Menu (CMD + K), a redesigned new Asset Management optimized for performance and reliability, and redesigned Content Table, and improvements to Roles and Permissions.
Joined by two new leaders
In 2023, two new experienced leaders joined our team to support our vision to build an innovative and future-proof platform to power the next generation of content management.
We are delighted to extend a warm welcome to Dr. Mario Lenz, joining us as our new Chief Product Officer (CPO), and Edan Gottlib as our new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).
#Q4 updates summary
This quarter, our teams continued to work on our new interface and made substantial progress on that front.
Here's a sneak peek of some of the improvements we plan to introduce in the new interface.
While the new interface is in the works, we also released the following new applications this quarter.
New applications
Akeneo
Akeneo is a Product Experience company and global leader in Product Information Management (PIM), helping organizations deliver enriched, engaging, consistent, and compelling product experiences across all owned and unowned channels.
The new app allows editors to search and link products from Akeneo directly from the Hygraph interface, and thereby deliver consistent product information across all channels; including eCommerce, mobile, print, social, points of sale, and beyond.
Check out the Akeneo integration on our marketplace →
Aprimo
Aprimo helps enterprises unleash the power of their content by providing an AI-powered content operations platform. It helps them manage content planning, creation, and distribution all in one place while leveraging in-depth insights into how their content performs.
The new app allows content editors to add assets from Aprimo directly from the Hygraph interface, thus preventing any duplication of assets or having editors jump from system to system.
Check out the Aprimo integration on our marketplace →
#Summary for 2023
New features and improvements
Here's a summary of all that we shipped this year:
- Top-level Remote Fields to allow you to fetch content from remote systems using one single Hygraph API, without the need to link remote content to content hosted in Hygraph.
- New app framework to add functionalities to Hygraph, connect to external systems, automate workflows and do much more.
- To help further reduce latency, we introduced Partial Cache invalidation and Read-write support on our high-performance cache. We will also be deprecating our old endpoint, so please make sure to replace it with the new endpoint.
- Assignment workflow that allows you to assign comments to other users.
- Improvements to Content Duplication with regards to relational fields, visibility of the duplication button, in-app messaging, and more.
- Improvements to our docs, which include a new revamped getting started workflow and docs to onboard editors.
New applications
Here are some of the notable integrations we launched on the marketplace this year:
- commercetools integration to link products in Hygraph.
- Scaleflex and Mux integration to link assets in Hygraph.
- EasyTranslate, Smartling and Crowdin integration for content localization in Hygraph.
- AltText.ai to automatically generate alt text for your images.
Awards and recognitions
Recognition by Gartner
This year, Hygraph was named as an Aspiring vendor in the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer Web Content Management report.
The "Voice of the Customer" is a document that synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights' reviews over an 18-month period of vendors with end users of companies with >$50M in annual revenue. It was an honor to receive such positive feedback from these enterprises.
Recognitions by Forrester
This year, Hygraph was recognized in both of Forrester's reports on DXPs and CMSs.
Amongst 300+ CMS vendors on G2, it's an honor to be included in the 32 recognized in Forrester's Content Management Systems Landscape, Q2 2023.
Moreover, it was an honor to be included in the 33 recognized vendors in Forrester's Digital Experience Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023.
Upheld our leadership status on G2
And again, we're proud to have completed 2023 with numerous recognitions on G2.
People highlights
We started the year with around 68 people, and we're ending with 80.
We've also grown in terms of diversity, as our team is now spread across five continents and 27 countries, with colleagues from 33 different nationalities. We have around 47% of our team working hybrid in Germany, and the rest 53% working remotely from around the world.
Despite being remote-first, each of our teams met in person at offsites in Prague, Sofia, and Marburg. Moreover, our Berlin HQ witnessed multiple meet-ups for team building and planning events. We also had 224 virtual coffees within the team.
We're a remote-first company and are committed to building a world-class team across several regions, so keep an eye out for any positions that may be a suitable match for you.
We plan to continue this growth in 2024 and hire across all teams!
#Looking forward
Before we enter into 2024, here's a quick outlook for Q1 and an overview of the key areas we will focus on and the features we plan to launch within them.
Plans for Q1 2024
Regional Management Server
Optimizing API performance is crucial for delivering an enhanced user experience, and we have been constantly introducing numerous improvements in this aspect.
Next quarter, we will be introducing distributed deployments for our Management Server. With the management server located on the same region as your content, you will get:
This will help Improve performance and disaster recovery, as well as provide further reduction in latency for management operations across all regions.
OAuth Support for Remote Sources
We will be introducing support for OAuth in addition to the existing authentication methods offered for Remote Sources.
Key areas of focus through the rest of the year
Features to increase efficiency of content editors
We plan to release features aimed at improving the efficiency at which content teams create, update, and publish content.
These include our Live Preview feature, where editors can see changes on a preview in real-time as they are made.
Other planned features later in the year include improved content discoverability, auto-saving of changes, improved publishing and more.
Features to improve the developer experience
Our major area of focus would be to release capabilities that help reduce the time it takes for developers to go-live and enhance their overall experience.
These include our app framework guide, enhancements to webhooks and management SDK, and more.
Features to facilitate evolving enterprise requirements
Based on feedback and evolving dynamics, we plan to release features that help teams meet enterprise requirements.
These include improved backups and recovery, improved import and export, configurable workflows and more.
#Concluding Note
2023 has been truly remarkable for us here at Hygraph. Our dedicated efforts were focused on prioritizing the success of our customers and community, leading to numerous milestones that fill us with pride.
As we approach 2024, let's take a moment to pause, reflect, and enjoy the holiday season.
Until next year,
Michael and Daniel
Blog Authors