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Stellate — the GraphQL platform for developers to easily speed up, manage, and scale GraphQL APIs — welcome to Boldstart!
At boldstart, we love to partner with technical founders who are solving a problem they’ve faced first-hand. That’s very much the case for Stellate founders Tim Suchanek and Max Stoiber. Tim faced the limitations with GraphQL as the first engineer at Prisma, while Max ran into them during his time at Gatsby. When we met Tim and Max, they were set on providing the best GraphQL edge cache.
We immediately knew we wanted to support this team. We led the seed round investment alongside angel Guy Podjarny (founder of Boldstart portfolio company Snyk), and now we are thrilled to continue our support alongside Tiger in a $25M Series A Round.
GraphQL — developed in 2012 and open sourced in 2015–was created as a more efficient alternative to REST. Instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server uses a single endpoint and responds with only the data a client has asked for. While this gives developers a lot of power, it also leaves them with a lot of responsibility to scale their application. Today, developers often cobble together a series of tools to try to solve these issues.
Enter Stellate — Given that the big benefit of GraphQL is allowing the developer to request any data when hitting the API, at first we wondered how caching would be the right first product. Tim and Max shared their hypothesis that GraphQL use cases that benefit most from caching are public, read-heavy APIs. These APIs can get huge performance improvements from a cache. On the other hand, private, write-heavy APIs don’t benefit from caching but run into other infrastructural issues. Stellate has already worked with customers to solve their issues around edge caching. They’ve seen that success with customers having as high as a 99% cache hit rate, and with 64x YoY growth.
They’ve also dug into analytics and performance monitoring of GraphQL APIs. In addition to Max and Tim, the early team already includes more domain experts like Phil Pluckthun, Andy Richardson, and Jovi De Crooke, lead maintainers on urql. With this raise, they’ll continue help developers to speed up, manage, and scale their GraphQL APIs. Stellate will be the platform to enable anyone to build & operate world-class GraphQL APIs.
The team is actively engaged with the GraphQL community as a member of the GraphQL Foundation. They’re also working to revive global GraphQL meetups and working on the new version of GraphiQL, the foremost GraphQL IDE.
At the end of the day, as Tim pointed out, “our goal is to make it easy to use GraphQL.” If you share this mission, the team is actively hiring. You can meet the team this week at the GraphQL Conf in Austin!
