This deal marks India’s tenth unicorn deal in 2022, already more than the seven from 2019, which was a record-breaking year for startup funding.
Hasura, a software firm that accelerates web app development, announced on February 22 that it had raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation led by Greenoaks Capital, demonstrating investor interest in pure software startups, which tend to burn less money and have a large market amid growing digitisation.
Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh founded Hasura in 2017 to reduce the time and knowledge necessary to construct GraphQL APIs for data access. GraphQL is an open-source query language that was created by Facebook.
It makes APIs (a piece of software that allows apps to communicate with one another) more customizable and reduces app development time by automating repetitive activities and optimising performance. Its previous backers, Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners (US), also contributed. Hasura will become India’s eighth unicorn in 2022, a phrase for private technology businesses valued at more than a billion dollars.
“There are few better signs of a powerful developer experience than enthusiastic adoption. And on this count, there aren’t many companies like Hasura. Since the launch of their GraphQL engine in 2018, Hasura has witnessed explosive uptake across countless organisations, from grassroots open-source projects, to some of the largest companies in the world. The common thread is substantial improvements in developer productivity and decreased time to market for mission-critical applications,” said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks Capital.
“This funding enables Hasura to greatly increase our innovation velocity, which in turn allows our rapidly expanding user base to deliver software even faster,” said Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal.
“Over the last few years, we’ve worked closely with our users and customers to address a massive gap in delivering and consuming data via an API standard that developers love – GraphQL. With this funding round, our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our vision to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity,” he added.
The deal is also a gain for early investor Nexus Venture Partners, whose successful software bets set it apart from other Indian venture capital companies. Druva, Postman, listed PubMatic, and H20.ai are among its most valuable software bets.
