Investments, Portfolio

Contentful raises $28m from General Catalyst to fuel the adoption of its content infrastructure, and help digital teams ship content faster

DEC 04, 2017

Contentful raises $28m from General Catalyst to fuel the adoption of its content infrastructure, and help digital teams ship content faster General Catalyst leads Series C to fuel Contentful’s mission to help digital teams ship and iterate content faster, across all of their websites, apps, and devicesContentful, the content infrastructure company, today announced it secured $28 million in series C financing. Led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Balderton Capital, and Point Nine Capital, the round puts the total funding raised to date to $45 million.

We’re living in the time of a Software Industrial Revolution, and Contentful is right in the middle of the action.Building a modern business means building software, and the way software is built changed dramatically. Developer teams are now using a modular software development stack based on purpose-built platform services that can be reused across all their applications.

Sascha Konietzke, CEO and co-founder of Contentful.

Despite the promise of the new modern stack, content got left behind. Content Management Systems (CMS) were designed for posts and pages, trying to be the one monolith to provide the whole solution for one use case at a time. Modern applications are pushing the content outside the browser and a CMS is just not built to cater to this change in a fast and efficient way.Content infrastructure solves these pains that decades-old CMS architectures cause in modern software development stacks. It completes the ecosystem of purpose-built platforms (e.g. Stripe, Twilio) that integrate seamlessly. With content infrastructure, developers and content creators can now power the content in all of their digital products – websites, apps, devices, or the next platform yet to come – without being bothered with discernible errors or complications.Contentful has seen adoption in the enterprise, from Fortune 500 companies to disrupting startups and top digital agencies. Amongst its customer base, you can find Telus, Spotify, WeWork, Oscar, AKQA, Huge, and R/GA.The newly acquired capital will be used to double down on the content infrastructure capabilities, growing its partner network, building its developer ecosystem, as well as scaling solution engineering and supporting enterprises. To meet these goals, the company will invest heavily in talent acquisition in the first quarters of the upcoming year. 

At General Catalyst, we focus on user-centric products that have the potential to become hugely useful in enterprises. Contentful is among this new ecosystem of platform services, which provide a fundamentally new infrastructure for building modern applications.

Trevor Oelschig, Managing Director at General Catalyst.

Contentful was founded in Berlin, Germany, in 2014 by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri out of dissatisfaction with the existing page-centric CMSes. In 2017 Contentful began to execute its overseas expansion plan by opening its US headquarters in San Francisco and growing the team to over 140 employees worldwide.Trevor Oelschig is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with approximately $3.75 billion in total capital raised. Working from the firm’s West Coast offices, Trevor’s investment focus lies in the application layer with an emphasis on companies with a developer-first approach. Before joining General Catalyst, Trevor spent nine years on the investment team at Bessemer Venture Partners. Trevor earned a BS in industrial engineering at UC Berkeley, an MS in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University and holds an MBA from The Wharton School.ABOUT CONTENTFULContentful provides the content infrastructure for digital teams to power content in any website, app, or device. Unlike a CMS, Contentful was built to integrate with the modern software stack, offering a central system of record for content, flexible APIs, and collaborative web app that enables developers and content creators to ship and iterate faster.PRESS CONTACTIrina Botea [email protected] (+49)162 322 7681 READ MORE ARTICLES