Lightspeed leads $25 mn funding round in data access solutions startup Hasura

San Francisco and Bengaluru headquartered Hasura, which runs an eponymous data access infrastructure startup, has secured $25 million (Rs 184 crore) in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Park, California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The startup operates most of its product development business from the Bengaluru office.

Returning investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.iO Fund participated in the round, along with new angel investor John Thomspon, chairman of Microsoft, a statement said.

The startup said it will use the fresh capital to accelerate hiring, and invest in its open source and commercial product development.

The company, including the latest capital infusion, has raised $36.5 million so far, the statement said.

In February, it received $9.9 million in a Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures US. In 2018, venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners led a $1.6 million seed funding round in the firm.

Founded in 2016 by IIT Madras graduate Tanmai Gopal and Stanford University Graduate School of Business alumnus Rajoshi Ghosh, Hasura helps businesses unlock data trapped in silos by connecting the data and services to applications using its open-source GraphQL application programme interface (API) platform.

To build applications, developers require access to data from popular databases such as MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. Hasura now supports all three databases, making it easy for app developers to access that data with a GraphQL-based API, the statement said.

“We’re very impressed by how developers have taken to Hasura and embraced the GraphQL approach to building applications… Hasura provides a lovely bridge for replatforming applications to cloud-native approaches, so we see this approach being embraced by enterprise developers as well as front-end developers more and more,” Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said.

Hasura’s open source GraphQL engine connects to databases and microservices and auto generates production-ready GraphQL backends to accelerate product development of applications.

“Data lives in lots of places, and in many different databases. We want our users to be able to access that data instantly with Hasura’s secure, scalable data access infrastructure so adding support for MySQL and SQL Server was our obvious next step,” Hasura co-founder Gopal said. 

The startup primarily competes with firms such as Y Combinator-backed Firebase, PostGraphile, Prisma and Salesforce-owned Heroku.

The company also offers Hasura Cloud, a managed service that provides access to data across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments with a unified GraphQL API.