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Contentful raises $175M at a $3B valuation from Tiger for its content delivery service

by Alex Wilhelm

Contentful this morning announced a $175 million Series F round of capital, led by Tiger Global, valuing the unicorn at around $3 billion. Contentful, formerly known as a UI-free content management system (headless CMS), now views itself in a broader light. More simply, Contentful provides customers with a service that will deliver images, words, and other content to their applications and websites around the world, quickly.

According to the company, Tidemark and Base10 Advancement Initiative were added to its cap table in the round, which also saw participation from previous investors. Prior to the round that Contentful announced today, its most recent fundraising event was an $80 million Series E led by Sapphire Ventures in June 2020.

PitchBook data indicates that that round was raised at a roughly $550 million valuation, while our reporting at the time of the company’s Series E includes the tidbit that “a Contentful spokesperson [told TechCrunch] that [the company was] approaching a $1 billion” valuation. Split the difference and it’s clear that Contentful’s new valuation is a multiple of what the company was worth a year ago.

But before we dig into metrics and results — or really a lack thereof — let’s take a minute to chat through Contenful’s business.

What does it do?

TechCrunch caught up with Contentful’s CEO, Steve Sloan (previously of Twilio and Bessemer), and its comms connect, Brian Spittler (previously of Podium), to dig more into its products.

Sloan explained Contentful by analogy, saying that as Twilio served the communications (Read more...)

Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform

by Frederic Lardinois

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV,
Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. In total, the company has now raised $163 million and its current valuation is $1.1 billion.

As Vercel notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months, with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. About half of the world’s largest 10,000 websites now use Next.js . Given the open-source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Vercel customers, but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s and Uber.

Image Credits: Vercel

“For us, it all starts with a front-end developer,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told me. “Our goal is to create and empower those developers — and their teams — to create delightful, immersive web experiences for their customers.”

With Vercel, Rauch and his team took the Next.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance.

Older solutions, Rauch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions. (Read more...)