Contentful Inc., a startup that helps enterprises manage digital content such as marketing web pages, has secured a $175 million late-stage funding round from Tiger Global, Base10 Advancement Initiative and Tidemark.

Contentful said in an announcement today that the Series F round values it at more than $3 billion.

Large enterprises often use multiple content management systems to manage their digital content. A company may have one CMS for its website, another to power marketing campaigns in its Android app and a third for iOS projects. That means that the information technology team has to maintain three separate systems to support the company’s content operations.

Contentful provides a so-called headless CMS that can manage content across all the devices and platforms through which an enterprise targets customers. This centralization allows companies to replace multiple CMS applications with one system. The resulting reduction in software complexity makes IT teams’ work easier, Contentful argues. 

According to the startup, a second benefit of centralizing everything in one CMS is that it makes republishing content across platforms less time-consuming.

Republishing content often requires design modifications. For example, if a retailer wishes to copy a marketing page from its website to its iOS app, it may have to adjust the font used in the page to ensure consistency with the app’s interface design. This process can take hours of work.

If a company uses one CMS for its website and another for its iOS app, the task is even more complicated because marketers have to transfer the content from one system to another. Contentful says that consolidating all of a company’s content in a single CMS reduces the need to transfer files between applications and thereby saves time for marketers.

The startup also promises to save time for a company’s software developers. Because of technical differences between CMS platforms, republishing content from one system to another often requires code modifications. In some cases, writing custom code is a perquisite to performing even seemingly simple tasks such as changing the text of a web page.

Contentful streamlines the process by making content that companies store in its platform available via application programming interfaces. These APIs make it possible to build software that automatically performs content-related tasks normally carried out by developers. The result is that developers are freed up to focus on other projects while marketers can update their content faster, since assistance from the software team is needed less often when parts of the workflow are automated. 

Contentful Chief Executive Officer Steve Sloan said in a statement that “this latest round of financing enables us to accelerate our pace of investment in our team and technology and enable our growing ecosystem of customers and partners to build on our platform and create the best content experiences for today’s consumer.”

The round makes Contentful one of the better funded startups in the headless CMS segment. Rivals include Contentstack Inc., which raised a $57.5 million round of funding in June, and Index Ventures-backed Strapi Solutions SAS.

The growing amount of capital raised by CMS startups may lead to more competition for Automattic Inc., the creator of WordPress. Automattic targets enterprises with a paid CMS platform based on WordPress called WordPress VIP.

The widening adoption of headless CMS platforms that partially automate the content republishing workflow is part of a broader trend of enterprises applying automation to streamline their marketing operations. Artificial intelligence is playing a big role in the trend. Startup ActiveCampaign Inc,. for example, recently achieved a more than $3 billion valuation thanks to its AI-powered marketing platform, which automatically determines the most opportune moments to display promotions to online shoppers.

Image: Contentful