Hasura Inc., a startup commercializing the open-source GraphQL development tool, is now valued at $1 billion after raising a $100 million funding round led by Greenoaks. 

Announced this morning, the Series C funding round included the participation of Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. Hasura has raised a total of more than $136 million from investors. 

San Francisco-based Hasura offers a software platform that makes it easier to use GraphQL, a popular open-source tool for making applications operate more efficiently. The tool provides many benefits for enterprise application projects, but it has a major disadvantage: It’s difficult to use. Hasura says its platform, the Hasura GraphQL Engine, automates up to 80% of the work involved in using GraphQL.

GraphQL is a tool for building application programming interfaces. APIs are what applications use to retrieve the information they process from the databases where that information is stored.

Usually, when an application requests records from a database, the database determines how the records are delivered and not the application. That can create technical issues. The database might, for example, send more information than the application requested, or it may provide the information in a format that the application can’t process efficiently. 

GraphQL optimizes the process. With GraphQL, developers can build an API that ensures a database doesn’t send more information than an application requested. 

Avoiding unnecessary data transfers saves bandwidth, which can translate to significant cost savings in large-scale enterprise software environments. Another benefit is increased application performance. Removing unnecessary data reduces the total amount of information that applications have to retrieve, which speeds up loading times.

GraphQL’s ability to increase the efficiency of APIs has made it highly popular among developers. The tool has been downloaded more than 400 million times since its release, according to Hasura.

GraphQL helps optimize not only the volume of the information that is retrieved from a database, but also the way the information is organized. A database and the applications connected to it often process information in different formats, which can lead to technical issues. GraphQL makes it possible to ensure both the database and the applications use the same format. 

GraphQL’s sophisticated feature set makes the tool complicated: building a GraphQL-powered API can take weeks in some cases. Hasura’s platform, the Hasura GraphQL Engine, promises to reduce the process from weeks to days by automating up to 80% work involved in building a GraphQL API.

“Over the last few years, we’ve worked closely with our users and customers to address a massive gap in delivering and consuming data via an API standard that developers love – GraphQL,” said Hasura co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tanmai Gopal (pictured, left, with co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Rajoshi Ghosh). “With this funding round, our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our vision to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity.”

As part of its feature set, Hasura provides tools that help companies manage their APIs after they are deployed. The startup offers cybersecurity capabilities for blocking malicious API requests. If a technical issue emerges in a GraphQL deployment, developers can use a set of built-in troubleshooting tools to identify the root cause.

In enterprise software projects, optimizing API performance is a major priority. The speed of the APIs to which an application is connected influences how fast it can fetch data and carry out computations. 

The Hasura GraphQL Engine includes a dashboard for monitoring query performance. If developers determine that a certain request runs slower than expected, they can perform troubleshooting. For frequently used queries, Hasura provides the ability to cache results and thereby further speed up application performance.

Hasura says major enterprises such as Atlassian Corp. PLC and Walmart Inc. are among the companies using its technology. With the newly closed $100 million funding round, Hasura will work to build more features for its GraphQL Engine and expand go-to-market operations. 

Photo: Hasura