French open-source CMS startup Strapi raises $4 million in seed funding

Strapi, a Paris, France-based open-source CMS, raises $4M in seed funding to deliver on its vision of making content accessible to any platform while offering the only fully open-source, JavaScript-based, community-powered and 100% customizable Headless CMS which is entirely free for developers.The round was led by Accel and Stride.vc. Notable angel investors and open-source experts, Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (Ex-CTO at Cloudera), also participated in this round.

Founded in May 2016 by Pierre Burgy (CEO), Aurélien Georget (CPO) and Jim Laurie (CTO), Strapi provides Headless, an open-source Headless Content Management System (CMS), with more than 500K downloads and 250 contributors. Strapi is already been used by thousands of companies such as IBM, Asos, Walmart, Societe Generale, Discovery Channel and hundreds of web agencies.

Strapi was born out of frustration and limitations of traditional CMSs. “At that time, Node.js was already growing like crazy. Being PHP, Java, and JavaScript developers, we saw in JavaScript the opportunity to use only one language for both the front-end and the back-end. Since we were heavy users of open-source projects and because we already thought that a Headless CMS should be open-source, we published the project on GitHub in October 2015,” co-founder Pierre Burgy, said in a blog post.

Strapi has been designed to be highly customizable and extensible through a powerful plugin system. This system will be finalized to make plugin development, publication, and updates seamless. The aim of a Headless CMS is to be connected to clients, via a website, a mobile application, or even a fridge! We plan to offer a smooth experience while providing SDKs, integrations, and starters.