Lightspeed Ventures Partners has led a Series B funding round worth $25 million for an Indian startup Hasura, that provides GraphQL API access to developers to facilitate access to databases. The service provides the option to get convenient access to databases, that can then help developers to build modern applications.
Existing investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.iO Fund also participated in this round.
“Hasura offers developers an instant GraphQL API on top of popular databases like Postgres, MySQL and SQL Server. The company’s bigger vision is to serve as a universal data access layer (like a proxy) that sits in between databases and consumers such as mobile/web apps or external API calls. This allows enterprises to incrementally move to GraphQL from REST APIs and provides missing capabilities like out-of-the-box authentication, governance, monitoring, analytics, rate limiting, and stateful caching. It also adds workflow to applications via webhook triggers on database events, and can create a unified GraphQL API across multiple databases, HTTP services, serverless functions, and third-party APIs. At Lightspeed, we believe that this kind of flexible, yet easy approach is what that next generation of developers is looking for. We see Hasura as the critical missing piece of data infrastructure to bring this new architecture to everyone,” Lightspeed said, announcing the investment.
The company’s platform can fetch data from internal and external data sources, upon which, a developer can specify relations, as well as security rules to build a data model that suits your needs. With that, Hasura will provide a managed unified GraphQL API to build modern applications.
“Hasura is an infrastructure component, a web service that presents your entire universe of application data as interlinked JSON documents that can be queried and operated on over the web,” the company says.
All of this might sound a little confusing to those of us who are not familiar with the world of app building, so let me simplify it for you. With Hasura, you can point to your databases and instantly get a rich, realtime API (Application Programming Interface) instantly. Lots of these APIs, and you have got yourself the basic structure of an app.
The company has also announced that it is adding support for MySQL database, since it had been demanded for a long time now. MySQL is one of the most popular and widely used databases to this day, and this new, almost essential addition, will help the company gain an even larger user base than it already has. Before this integration, the platform only PostgreSQL databases.
It is also adding support for SQL server as well, even though that it still in early access.
“In addition to this financing, we released alpha support for MySQL today, and SQL Server is actively underway. This process has enabled us to think about how we build the underlying abstractions for supporting multiple, different databases. We are going to be accelerating our work with the community to rapidly build, and maintain, native & no-code connectors to more SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL databases and other data-sources,” the company said in the blog post.
Moreover, as a part of this round, the company will see Gaurav Gupta assuming the role of VC, after having served at executive positions in Splunk, Elastic, and Grafana.
