Storyblok to become the backbone of next-gen CMS with $47M Series B round
We’re excited to announce that we have joined Storyblok’s $47M Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital and HV Capital, and existing investor firstminute capital, to make headless content management the new standard.
Storyblok is on an exponential, yet healthy and sustainable growth path with strong organic traction. Following the Series A funding round in February 2021, Storyblok has grown the remote team by 500%, now spanning 38 countries, and has more than doubled its users, projects, and agency partners. The user base has scaled to 74,000 developers and marketers from 130+ countries, building 120,000 projects. The new funding will further accelerate product innovation, expansion into the U.S., Europe and APAC – as well as the growth of the ecosystem of partners and apps. The visionary team led by Dominik Angerer and Alex Feiglstorfer is determined to continue building the best headless CMS experience, scaling storytelling everywhere.
3VC Partner, Peter Lasinger, supported co-founders Dominik and Alex from day 1. He takes the Series B milestone to look back on the incredible journey and unique partnership over the past five years:
A fortunate encounter in 2017
Great things often happen by serendipity: at the beginning of 2017, I was helping out one of my previous portfolio companies Roomle as an interim CFO and also ended up supporting its mother company Netural. During one of the famous Netural lunches, Albert (the founder of Netural and Roomle) introduced me to two of his employees, Dominik and Alexander. The spark was lit: these two founders-to-be had solved a really tough problem with an amazingly mature product, being extremely smart and humble.
From many to one: finding focus
Few things in life are obvious or come easy. Dominik and Alexander were working on a multitude of exciting projects and products, but there was a lack of focus. After many debates over lunch and coffee, they decided to go forward focusing on Storyblok. They also decided to form and spin out a company. Albert and Stephan, the co-founders of Netural, recognised the opportunity and agreed not only to let Dominik and Alexander leave the company and take their software with them but also to provide support and customers, thus becoming their angel investors.
The magic of new beginnings: hello world!
In October 2017, Storyblok was incorporated and immediately turned into a profitable, bootstrapped company. I continued to mentor the founders to help them find product-market fit and achieve initial growth. They chose a remote-first approach, which was still unique five years ago. They envisioned that this would allow them to build an international and diverse team from the very beginning. In 2018, it became clear that further growth would require outside funding and leaving the bootstrapped path.
Chance favors the prepared mind:
After Roman and I started 3VC in 2018, it became clear that our fund would be the ideal partner for the next expansion phase of Storyblok in 2019. Being a Sequoia Alumni, Roman knew about the power of the right networks and experiences. We found a perfect match with firstminute capital and in November 2019 the investment was announced.
3VC has helped Storyblok with the right mentors and hires (this includes bringing in Venture Partner Marius Istrate for people advice and forming the sales team by hiring a VP of Sales from the 3VC network) to prepare them for further growth.
G(r)o(w), G(r)o(w), G(r)o(w):
2020 was all about acceleration and testing the sales/growth engine, before bringing in Mubadala Capital as a strong financial partner and investor in 2021 and growing the team and sales further. By the end of 2021, it became clear that with the strongest offering in the market (according to G2), the only limiting factor was additional marketing and sales power. Hence the logical next step was selecting the right growth investor for the next phase: a warm welcome to HV Capital for joining the pack! This is just the beginning.
Explore career opportunities at Storyblok: https://www.storyblok.com/jobs
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TechCrunch has the full story on the Series B funding round: Storyblok raises $47M to build out its headless CMS aimed at non-technical users like marketers
