Contentstack Raises $80M to Grow Headless CMS Platform for Enterprise • TechCrunch

The market for enterprise content management systems (CMS) is growing exponentially due to the increasing need to organize and manage documents, images and other digital content. According to Allied Market Research, the overall CMS sector could be worth $53.2 billion by 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2020.

While the concept of CMS has existed for decades, it is a relatively new innovation – the so-called Headless CMS – begins to attract both market share and investor interest. Headless CMS systems work primarily as content repositories, managing the back-end infrastructure and allowing for a lot of customization on the front end. They are similar to widgets or plugins on a website; A headless CMS is usually combined with a separate presentation layer that handles design and structure components, templates, and so on.

Contentstack is one of the leading headless CMS providers for enterprise customers. The company announced today that it has raised $80 million in a Series C round led by Georgiana and Insight Partners, which also saw participation from Illuminate Ventures. Having raised $169 million to date, ContentStack plans to use the funds for customer acquisition, geographic expansion, new partnerships and product development, CEO Neha Sampath told TechCrunch.

“Contentstack empowers marketers and developers to deliver scalable digital experiences at the speed of their mind through automated, headless CMS technology,” Sampat said in an email. “Converged architectures ensure enterprises can innovate faster, deploy new features faster, and remain agile in the face of digital disruption. No one is ‘stuck’ in undeveloped monolithic systems, either with business or with the world.

In the year Founded in 2018, Contentstack grew out of Raw Engineering, a fifteen-year-old consulting firm that started Raw Engineering in 2013, and the Built.io app development platform. Raw Engineering in 2018). Sampat – who founded Built.io – partnered with Nishant Patel, former VP of engineering at Software AG (which went on to acquire Built.io) and co-founder of Built.io, to launch ContentStack.

Contentstack competes with headless CMS providers, including Storyblok, which raised $47 million in May for non-technical CMS users, and Prismic, which recently raised $20 million to build a fully managed CMS. (Fun fact: VCs invested more than $118 million in CMS startups last year alone.) Strapi and Kontent are among the startup’s other competitors. But Sampat made the case that ContentStack is the only CMS that offers automation capabilities that don’t require code.

Using workflows within Contentstack, users can review, approve, and publish content across their organization. Marketplace provides a hub for extensions, apps and integrations developed by customers, partners and the company’s own engineering team.

“Typically, content management requires a lot of backend development and programming skills. This comes with risks, such as the risk of interrupting other processes, difficult and lengthy requirements to implement the solution in the tech stack, and lack of flexibility or flexibility in content flow,” says Sampath. “With Contentstack’s composite architecture, enterprises can unlock the potential of a technology stack that can quickly and easily align their martech stack and tools to their unique brand, team and customer experience needs.”

Is the Contentstack platform as easy to use as the competition? in case. But the data shows that many organizations, regardless of the vendor, struggle to use CMS to its full potential. In a 2021 survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 56% of employees said integration issues hindered their CMS implementation, while 55% blamed a lack of training.

The company, which has more than 400 employees, appears to have won out over enterprises, although it has a client base that includes Shell, JPMorgan Chase, HP, McDonald’s and Mattel, as well as several unnamed public sector agencies. The company says it has doubled its customer base since last summer and surpassed 50,000 users on the platform.

“The pandemic and recent economic pressures have caused significant changes in the market, forcing enterprises to reassess the performance of existing digital investments and shift their focus to efficiency. Ultimately, this means that enterprises now have a higher return on investment on digital investments. “Having a unified architecture for digital strategy allows it to iterate at pace and keep up with ever-changing trends and demands. Content Inventory is well-positioned to enable these digital leaders to excel, combining a proven ‘value-based and success-based’ approach to a modern, scalable architecture that will last for the long term.” Time is measured and consistent.