INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Prisma, a Berlin and San Francisco startup that is betting big on GraphQL — the data query language originally developed by Facebook to
make it easier for front-end code to talk to application servers — has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.Silicon Valley’s Kleiner
Perkins led the round, with participation from a number of angel investors, many of whom have deep roots in the developer and/or open source
space, including Nick Schrock, one of the creators of GraphQL itself.TechCrunch first learned of Kleiner’s pending investment in Prisma
(formerly Graphcool) back in March, when the deal hadn’t yet closed
In a brief call yesterday, Prisma co-founder and CEO Johannes Schickling confirmed the investment and explained that the startup sought to
raise from West Coast VCs and investors, rather than European VCs, who “really understand Open Source,” noting that any serious
developer offering has to take a bottom up approach in order to become adopted by the wider developer community.To that end, Schickling
tells me Prisma itself has pivoted away from its narrower Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model to an Open Source one, with the core offering
— dubbed “Prisma 1.0” — released as a standalone infrastructure component under an Apache 2 open source license.The company is
building what it describes as the GraphQL data layer for all databases, in recognition that modern backends typically combine and connect to
multiple specialised databases e.g
Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Neo4j etc
This requires complex “mapping logic” to the underlying databases, which is precisely the heaving-lifting that Prisma has set out to
Prisma wants you to be able to access all of your databases in a single GraphQL query.Schickling says the new funding will be used to
bolster the team, including opening an office in San Francisco in addition to its Berlin engineering base
On the product roadmap is support for more databases
Prisma currently plugs into MySQL and Postgres, but plans to add the likes of MongoDB, Elastic, and Cassandra.Alongside the startup’s open
source product, it offers Prisma Enterprise to enable critical security workflows (compliance, access control, audit logging etc.) and
Prisma Cloud for teams to collaborate and easily manage databases.Prisma’s other seed investors include Robin Vasan (board member of
HashiCorp, Couchbase, InfluxData), John Komkov (Fathom Capital), Augusto Marietti (CEO Kong), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Zeit), Spencer Kimball
(CEO CockroachDB), and Nicholas Dessaigne (CEO Algolia).
