Stellate, formerly known as GraphCDN, is bringing its expertise in GraphQL APIs to the masses with the help of a $25 million Series A from Tiger Global and a $5 million seed round led by boldstart ventures.
Stellate will use the raise to build the global data graph by connecting the world’s GraphQL APIs to enable innovation, efficiencies, and cost savings on a scale never before seen. This is especially relevant considering the current explosion of data, which shows no signs of slowing; in five years time, you’ll have 2.5 times more data than you do today.
“The world consists of data,” Max Stoiber, Stellate CEO and co-founder, said. “Most of that data is related to each other but nobody’s establishing these connections. If we can enable companies to make their GraphQL APIs accessible to third-party developers and then connect all of them, that will provide a ton of value for the world.”
For example, you might want to figure out if the customer who just submitted a ticket is a high-value customer by checking the matching subscription in Stripe’s data and whether there are any associated high-value deals with that customer’s company in Salesforce. At the moment, this would require hours of integration work. With the global data graph, this would be reduced to a single query.
This is all made possible by GraphQL, an API technology invented at Meta that turns APIs from a list of endpoints into graphs. Only once the world’s APIs are graphs can you actually connect them together into the global data graph.
“GraphQL’s flexibility is awesome for developers but makes security and schema evolution more difficult, particularly once any third-parties use your API,” Tim Suchanek, Stellate co-founder and CTO said. “That’s why our first step to get to the global data graph is to build tooling that enables companies to make their GraphQL APIs accessible to third-party developers.”
Suchanek explained that operating a GraphQL API in production isn’t easy or straightforward. Outside the walls of MANGA, most companies don’t have the engineering capacity to invest in solving problems around the core technology, such as abuse protection and performance, which leads to online rants like these. Stellate co-founders, Max Stoiber and Tim Suchanek, believe that everyone deserves access to the best tooling and analytics for this incredibly powerful API.
“As a technical founder myself with deep experience in developer tooling, I knew the moment I met Max and Tim that they were solving a real problem for developers,” said Ellen Chisa, partner at boldstart ventures. “It’s an honor to partner with amazing founders from the very beginning of their journey and support them through IPO.”
The founders, Max Stoiber, who created styled-components and Spectrum (acquired by GitHub), and Tim Suchanek, author of the GraphQL Playground and first engineer at Prisma, will focus their expertise on developer tooling to make opening up APIs safe and secure as the first step toward building a global data graph.
“We seek to invest in game-changing companies, and we expect Stellate to be one of our winners,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global Management. “We’re looking forward to enabling Stellate to achieve its vision of unlocking the world’s data.”
