Software firm Hasura turns unicorn, raises $100 million led by Greenoaks Capital

Tanmai Gopal (left) and Rajoshi Ghosh, founders of Hasura.

Software firm Hasura, which makes web app development faster, said on February 22 that it has raised $100 million at a valuation of a billion dollars led by Greenoaks Capital, continuing investor interest for pure software startups which tend to burn less money and have a large market amid growing digitisation.

Founded in 2017 by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh, Hasura cuts down the time and expertise required to build GraphQL APIs for data access. GraphQL is an open-source language for queries originally developed by Facebook. 

It helps make APIs — a piece of software that helps apps talk to each other — more flexible and cuts down app development time by automating repetitive functions and optimising performance. Its existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners (US) invested too. The deal makes Hasura India’s tenth unicorn in 2022 — a term for private tech companies valued at over a billion dollars. 

“There are few better signs of a powerful developer experience than enthusiastic adoption. And on this count, there aren’t many companies like Hasura. Since the launch of their GraphQL engine in 2018, Hasura has witnessed explosive uptake across countless organisations, from grassroots open-source projects, to some of the largest companies in the world. The common thread is substantial improvements in developer productivity and decreased time to market for mission-critical applications,” said Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks Capital.

“This funding enables Hasura to greatly increase our innovation velocity, which in turn allows our rapidly expanding user base to deliver software even faster,” said Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal. 

“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. 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,” he added.

The deal also marks another win for early investor Nexus Venture Partners, whose successful software bets mark it out from other VC firms in India. Its most valued software bets include Druva, Postman, listed PubMatic and H20.ai among others.