How Nexus Backed-Hasura Use its Investment to Foster Indian Ecosystem

The San Francisco- and Bengaluru-headquartered software company, Hasura has recently garnered $9.9 million in Series A funding round. Vertex Ventures US led the funding round of the Nexus-backed startup, which renders  data access and data flow tools, as well as services, through GraphQL APIs. 

Other investors, who participated in the funding round, include SAP.iO Fund, which is an early-stage venture arm of SAP, James Tamplin, Founder of Firebase, Sam Lambert, VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub, Amod Malvia, Co-founder at Udaan, Former CTO of Flipkart, and Michael Stoppelman, Former SVP of Engineering at Yelp. Existing investment companies--Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC also infused money in the startup.  

With this funding, Hasura will invest heavily in engineering and product development, notably providing more ready-made integrations with databases and other data sources, in addition to hiring across sales and marketing.

“Hasura has significantly reduced the time our engineers spend writing boilerplate GraphQL code. However, what really drove adoption of Hasura at Stoplight is the powerful and flexible permissions system it provides out of the box, and how easy it is to incrementally introduce to an existing tech stack,” said Marc MacLeod, Founder & CEO at Stoplight. 

Stoplight, an API Design Management Platform, moved their boilerplate GraphQL and authorization into Hasura from their own GraphQL server.

How Hasura’s Funding Bringing an Impact on its Indian Subsidiary 

The company, which is based out of Bengaluru, makes data access easy and augments product delivery by instantly creating GraphQL API. The latest capital infusion will be adequately used by the company, alternating into the American as well as Indian businesses.  

“We will be hiring engineers across the stack in Bangalore. As an open source company based out of Bangalore, we also hope to be able to foster the open source ecosystem and also build up the GraphQL community in India,” Rajoshi Ghosh, Co-founder of Hasura, said in an interview with BusinessEx. 

The startup currently runs an international GraphQL conference in Bangalore called GraphQL Asia. It also manages a community tech event space in Koramangala wherein it manages and hosts events. 

How will Startup be Using the Funding Sum? 

The company has garnered an ignoramus sum this time. It has decided to infuse money in enhancing its specialisation and focusing on important areas. 

“Hasura has an amazing fit with Postgres and the Postgres vendor ecosystem including new age distributed SQL Postgres vendors,” Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura, said in the company’s official statement. 

“While we double down on the Postgres ecosystem, these funds will help us bring the Hasura and GraphQL experience to other databases to mobilize data in organizations by making high-performance and secure data access a reality,” Gopal added. 

“We will serve the needs of our production and enterprise users better than ever before. Another emphasis will be put on doubling down on the GraphQL, security and Postgres features that the Hasura community wants and deliver them. We will also be bringing the Hasura experience to other databases beyond the Postgres ecosystem and work with database vendors,” Rajoshi Ghosh, Co-founder of Hasura, separately told BusinessEx. 

Ghosh also added that the company (Hasura) will invest in its users and its community, who have helped make Hasura what it is today.

How is Hasura Assisting Tech Developers and Other Companies ?

Hasura’s technology, powered by a highly concurrent just-in-time compiler, can process GraphQL queries and efficiently map them into queries to multiple underlying systems (like SQL databases, REST APIs etc). This method permits the software company to carry out user-given transformations, implement security policies and apply caching requirements in an efficient and scalable way that is cloud-native.

“Hasura’s out-of-the-box support for real-time data via GraphQL subscriptions, granular access-control system and support for geospatial data has dramatically accelerated our efforts to modernize our data access layer for internal API consumers,” says Dr. Andreas Sindlinger, Solution Architect at Jeppesen (A Boeing Company).

The startup's open-source traction and developer adoption has grown gradually, going more than 28 million downloads and 15k GitHub stars. According to 2019 JavaScript Rising Stars’ report Hasura GraphQL engine was one of the fastest-growing projects in the past year (2019).

“Hasura makes it possible for front-end teams to use GraphQL and move fast without breaking things on the back-end,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US. 

“We invested because of the incredible velocity of their product engineering, the tremendous community the founders built in such short order, and the pull from enterprises who want to empower their engineers to move with FAANG-like agility while supporting ops teams with performance management, security, and data access,” Bhadra said.