Norwegian tech startup Sanity raises $39M to grow its unified content platform for building data-driven content solutions

Sanity, a provider of a unified content platform that helps brands treat content as data for transformative digital experiences, announced today that it has raised $39 million in Series B funding led by the VC that bet early on Marketo, Canva, and Airtable.

The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $51.8 million since its founding in 2016, was co-led by ICONIQ Growth with venture capital firms Lead Edge Capital, Threshold Ventures, Heavybit, and Alliance Venture. ICONIQ Growth General Partner Doug Peppe was the first investor in Marketo before its acquisition by Adobe for $4.75 billion in 2018. Peppe also has a track record of early bets on strong B2B software players like Canva, Braze, Datadog, and Airtable.

In conjunction with the funding, Sanity also announced that ICONIQ Growth General Partner Doug Peppe has joined its board of directors.

The latest funding comes less than a year after its $9.3 million Series A fundraise in October 2020. Nearly 100,000 developers, marketers, content creators, and product professionals use Sanity to manage and launch customer-facing digital initiatives, including brands like National Geographic, Puma, Invision, Datastax, and Brex. In the past year, the company tripled its customer base, more than doubled its team, and doubled its annual revenue as brands like Unilever, Sonos, Figma, Netlify, and Flex use Sanity to accelerate digital initiatives

Founded in 2016 by Even Westvang, Magnus Kongsli Hillestad, Oyvind Rostad, and Simen Svale Skogsrud, Sanity is a software platform designed for delivering structured content to products and devices. It lets people create completely custom interfaces and content workflows while Sanity’s real-time API lets you deliver content from a single source to any channel, device, or product.

What makes Sanity different is that it treats content as data. This makes content programmable by developers and enables them to automate and enrich content automatically using business logic and algorithms. Developers love it, and companies do too because it makes it easy for business users to collaborate with devs on customer-facing projects.

“In an era of digital globalization, companies must rapidly deliver complex, multi-channel, and engaging digital experiences to reach customers wherever they are. This is forcing them to rethink the CMS. At the same time, developers are increasingly leading the adoption of new technologies and holding the keys to adapt effectively to this shift,” said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Growth. “Sanity has created the hero product for building innovative product experiences, with an impressive developer-oriented approach to content delivery and a personalized product experience that breaks down silos for content creators, marketing, and developer teams. We’re excited to support the Sanity team as they enter this next phase of growth.”

A fast-growing alternative to the traditional CMS, Sanity succeeds by uniquely treating content as data. By storing resources in the Sanity Content Lake organizations de-silo their content, making it available both for collaboration and for global distribution. The benefits of having a single source of truth are many, but a typical outcome is a velocity as businesses use actual product data to drive digital efforts. Teams are unblocked and free to work on content, design, and code in parallel to ship better products faster. Editors work efficiently in customized editing environments built on top of Sanity’s open source Content Studio that developers are free to customize.

“Sanity has played a key role in helping us scale our content engine. It’s changed the way we think about structuring content, giving us more flexibility to experiment with new ways of driving the customer experience,” said Isaac Martin, senior software engineer at Brex. “Our team loves being more self-reliant, with the creative freedom to get work done without a constant back-and-forth with engineering.”

“Sanity has made it possible for us to build virtually anything we dream up. It’s really increased the level of innovation and creativity we can bring to web projects,” said Eric Johnson, principal web developer at Cornerstone OnDemand. “We’ve been able to offload a lot of work from the developer team by building powerful and flexible page builder tools.”