Storyblok, a ‘headless’ CMS for developers and marketers to deliver content, has raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round led by Mubadala Capital, alongside existing Storyblok investors firstminute capital and 3VC.
The Austria-founded company’s platform counts Pizza Hut, Adidas, UPC, Greggs, Decathlon and others among its roster of clients, alongside many thousands of solo developers that use its CMS. That means it’s currently powering more than 60,000 projects, it says.
Storyblok says its CMS provides ‘highly customizable content blocks and visual editing tools’ in n contrast to other headless CMS solutions which are flexible for developers but might be less so for actual editors to edit.
Dominik Angerer, Co-Founder and CEO of Storyblok, said in a statement: “The marketing world is in a state of transition. Fragmented channels and rapidly changing consumer behavior as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic have made it much more challenging to efficiently and quickly keep brand messaging consistent across multiple platforms. On paper, headless CMS technology solves a lot of these problems, but in practice, most platforms are only geared towards developers, which makes them incredibly difficult for non-technical people to use. Storyblok’s solution marries the needs of both editors and developers, which has given us a unique position in the market and resulted in rapid growth.”
Fatou Bintou Sagnang, director at Mubadala Capital said: “In a vast but relatively homogenous market, Storyblok has impressed us with a truly differentiated product that resonates with small and large enterprises. The organic traction is proof of the customer love from both developers and marketers.”
Competitors to Storyblok include ContentStack, Contentful, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager and Prismic.
Speaking to TechCrunch Angerer said: “A lot of headless CMS platforms are easily integrated into legacy systems but when it comes to actually using them on a daily basis marketers or other editors find them incredibly difficult to use. In practice, they end up having to go back to their IT or developer teams to sort out problems or make major changes which ends up wasting the time and money that headless CMS’s perport to save.”
