Hygraph raised a $10 million Series A investment led by OpenOcean in July 2021. This round brought Hygraph's total funding to $13.7 million and marked OpenOcean's largest single investment to date. Other participants included Peak, Paua Ventures, Mango Capital's Robin Vasan, Fauna founder Evan Weaver, and Instana founder Mirko Novakovic. Source
Hygraph's vision is to unify data and enable content federation, empowering businesses to create impactful digital experiences. Its mission is to remove traditional content management pain points through a GraphQL-native architecture, taking the concept of a Headless CMS to the next level. Source
Hygraph is a GraphQL-native headless content management system (CMS) designed to unify data and enable content federation. It allows businesses to aggregate and serve content from multiple sources through a single API endpoint, reducing complexity and accelerating digital product development. Source
Content Federation is Hygraph's meta-layer approach that connects siloed content and integrates APIs, enabling seamless data fetching from external systems like Salesforce, Shopify, SAP, and commercetools. Developers can fetch and join content across CMS, DAM, PIM, or any other service, issuing a single API call to aggregate content and data from multiple sources. This reduces development time and costs when integrating with multiple APIs. Source
Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a user-friendly interface. It supports integrations with popular platforms (e.g., Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, AWS S3, Cloudinary), provides robust security and compliance, and enables rapid content delivery for impactful digital experiences. Source
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. Detailed API documentation is available at the Hygraph API Reference.
Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including hosting and deployment (Netlify, Vercel), headless commerce (BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify), localization (Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling), digital asset management (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), personalization and AB testing (Ninetailed), artificial intelligence (AltText.ai), and more. For a full list, visit the Hygraph Integrations page.
Hygraph is optimized for rapid content delivery, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Its architecture supports scalability for high-demand periods and large-scale projects, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions. Source
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers enterprise-grade security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. Source
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For detailed pricing and feature breakdowns, visit the Hygraph Pricing page.
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises modernizing their tech stack, and brands scaling across geographies or re-platforming from traditional solutions. Source
Hygraph is used across industries such as food and beverage (e.g., Dr. Oetker), consumer electronics (e.g., Samsung), automotive (e.g., AutoWeb), healthcare (e.g., Vision Healthcare), travel and hospitality (e.g., HolidayCheck), media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (e.g., Bellhop), marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. Source
Customers can expect significant time savings, faster speed-to-market, improved customer experience, and operational efficiency. For example, Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, and Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization. Source
Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available on the Hygraph product page.
Hygraph addresses operational pains (e.g., reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting needs from global teams), financial pains (e.g., high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (e.g., boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, OpenID integration challenges). Source
Hygraph provides an intuitive interface for non-technical users, modernizes outdated systems with a GraphQL-native, API-first architecture, ensures consistent branding across regions, and streamlines workflows to reduce costs and accelerate speed-to-market. It also simplifies development by reducing boilerplate code and streamlining query management. Source
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, number of updates made without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI on CMS investment, time to market for new products, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. Source
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use resources like documentation and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Source
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to detailed documentation, video tutorials, and a community Slack channel. Source
Notable customers include Sennheiser, HolidayCheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more, visit the Hygraph Case Studies page.
Written by Michael & Daniel
on Jul 22, 2021Today, we’re proud to announce that Hygraph has closed a $10M Series A round led by OpenOcean to help us realize our vision of building unified Content APIs and Federating the Content Layer. We’re excited to share that this is OpenOcean’s largest single investment to date, and Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner at OpenOcean, will be joining our board.
Previous investors Peak and Paua Ventures also participated in this round. Mango Capital’s Robin Vasan (investor in HashiCorp, Netlify, and others), Fauna founder and CTO, Evan Weaver, and Instana (acquired by IBM) founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic also joined as strategic investors, bringing our total funding to $13.7 million.
With the rise of best-of-breed microservices in enterprise systems design, content is now stored in a myriad of disconnected data silos. This has resulted in overwhelming complexity when it comes to composing multiple services into an easy-to-use API for software development.
Rather than companies using resources and spending time and money in building custom middleware, we strongly believe that the solution to this dilemma is in enabling teams to “Federate the Content Layer” by integrating their APIs into a single source of truth. By serving and consuming content from a single endpoint, teams can realize their goal of reducing complexity in their stack and delivering better high-performance experiences.
To us, Headless CMS as a category has reached a point where the frontend-agnostic benefits are no longer enough. Rather than adding yet another service to complex stacks, we want to expand upon the possibilities of allowing content aggregation from multiple sources programmatically, essentially becoming backend agnostic as well.
We recently announced “Content Federation”, a novel meta-layer approach to seamlessly connect siloed content and integrate APIs, that allows seamless data fetching from external systems such as Salesforce, Shopify, SAP, and commercetools in a matter of minutes. Using Content Federation, developers can fetch and join content across their CMS, DAM, PIM, headless commerce platform), or any other service, issuing a single API call to aggregate content and data from multiple sources into a single API programmatically. This approach leads to a massive reduction in development time and costs when integrating with multiple APIs.
The topic of integrating APIs at an enterprise level has always been a challenging subject given the complexity of having several systems working together in harmony. We aim to become the meta-layer that “federates” the layers and stacks into a single endpoint as the overall API integrator. This evolution would allow development teams to accelerate their product development process by consuming and serving all their content from a single source, essentially invalidating any content siloes.
Product development and application content have extremely specific and complex needs, which is why we want to develop a flexible content platform for a broader set of demanding and programmatic use-cases. This has led to wide adoption of Hygraph as a go-to platform for content-rich applications, such as Netflix-like video-on-demand platforms, content exploration apps, product catalogs, and booking engines, going further than the wider website and eCommerce focused use cases.
“Hygraph is a business primed to solve the challenges facing the industry today, from the exponential growth of siloed data to the increasing complexity of the enterprise digital journey. Firms are crying out for a new approach that delivers applications with the convenience of a database, the collaborative nature of a content platform, and the extensibility of an API gateway. Hygraph’ breakthrough approach combines the best of the GraphQL and content management system worlds to give their customers the edge over the competition, and the opportunity to lead the way in the era of rapid digitalization” says Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner at OpenOcean.
There has been a significant shift in the way content is being created, delivered, and consumed, with enterprises grappling to keep up with the fast-paced requirements of the omnichannel world. This change is huge in terms of accelerating the product development cycle, saving enterprises time and money, and enabling them to better serve their customers.
It promises to be a key enabler of the online world as data continues to grow in importance and complexity, and we’re excited to share this next step of our journey with you.
To explore how Hygraph can help break your content silos and federate your stack into a single endpoint, get in touch with our team!
To join us in realizing our vision for a unified Content Layer, we’re rapidly growing our team across several functions. If you (or a friend) are looking to share that journey with us, explore our current openings!
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