Developer-led Content Management: Why Grand Ventures is excited to invest in Payload CMS
We’re thrilled to announce Grand Venture’s latest investment in the team behind Payload CMS, the open source “headless CMS” project that has skyrocketed in deployment and popularity over the past 6 months. Grand Ventures invested in Payload’s $4.7M seed round alongside Gradient Ventures (Google’s early-stage VC fund), MongoDB Ventures, Y Combinator, Exceptional Capital, as well as other notable angel investors.
We fell in love with Payload’s API-driven, developer-centric approach to content management and their potential to lead within the $50B Content Management space.
What make’s Payload’s groundbreaking content management system (CMS) different is that it is designed, from the ground up, to be “headless”.
What is a headless CMS?
The previous generation of Content Management Systems (CMS), like Wordpress & Drupal, were created at a time when the “web” specifically meant the desktop experience. While those CMSs have been adapted over time, there are structural and design limitations when used to deliver content across the modern cross-channel landscape — including mobile, social, voice, and AR/VR.
As opposed to traditional CMSs, a headless CMS make it’s content accessible via APIs for display on any device without a built-in, front-end or presentation layer. The term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” (the front-end) off the “body” (the back-end). Headless CMSs are a natural evolution designed with developers as it’s first class citizen / primary ICP, as opposed to the content manager persona that traditional CMSs have been focused on for the past 20+ years.
What is Payload CMS?
Payload’s headless CMS is aimed squarely at developers, from the ground up, to deliver them what they need to build great digital products. It’s a code-first CMS, which enables users (ie developers) of Payload CMS to do things that haven’t been really possible before with legacy CMSs or even some of the first wave of headless CMS that hit the market in recent years. Payload CMS provides the following benefits for developers:
- Because of it’s headless API-first, developer-centric design, Payload CMS can be managed directly from within existing CI/CD pipelines
- Payload gives you everything you need, but then steps back and lets you build what you want in JavaScript or TypeScript — with no unnecessary complexity brought by GUIs. You’ll understand how your CMS works because you will have written it exactly how you want it.
- Completely control the Admin panel by using your own React components. Swap out fields or even entire views with ease.
- Use your data, however and wherever you need, thanks to auto-generated, yet fully extensible REST, GraphQL, and Local Node APIs.
Why Grand Ventures invested in Payload
Below are three of the reasons why we fell in love with the Payload opportunity:
First, their traction— since Payload made the Payload CMS Gitub repository public earlier this year, community adoption has skyrocketed. Their GitHub star count has grown 700% over the past 6 months, blowing through passed 8000 Github star threshold this month, and is on a trajectory to pass >10K GitHub stars by the end of the year. Payload CMS has already been deployed over 2700 times into production environments, and they’ve seeing nearly 40% MoM increase in new ‘server inits’. It wasn’t just the eye-popping open source usage metrics that got us excited, it’s also the tidal wave of commercial interest Payload is seeing in their Enterprise Offering which just launched a month ago. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that Payload is on the fast path towards becoming a market-leader in CMS.
Second, the nexus of market opportunity and technology approach. Payload scored highly within the key criteria areas we look for in our investments, including (a) Massive market -> Payload plays in the $50B Content Management market at a moment in time when existing legacy CMS solutions are at their evolutionary end-point (b) Developer-centric -> Payload’s approach fully integrates the CMS process into modern CI/CD pipeline architectures, allowing the CMS to be supported by engineering and operations teams working together in an agile way (c) API — Driven -> Payload was designed from the get-go to be managed, configured, and accessed using APIs, making it easily leveraged by the rapidly growing stack of microservice-based best-of-breed services that modern Developer are using to create applications.
Third, Payload’s team. James Mikrut, Payload’s founder and CEO,spent much of his earlier career working in and even founding an Digital Agency and learned first hand the limitations that legacy CMSs exhibit within modern developer-centric environments. The rest of Payload’s founding team also comes out of the Digital Agency world where CMSs are the center of the tech stack. Payload shines because it was forged from those real-world experiences.
Because of these advantages, Payload is positioned to become the CMS of choice for anybody prioritizing a developer-centric approach to multichannel content management.
We are excited to be investing behind James and the entire Payload team to help them drive the next wave of API-driven infrastructure for content management.
If you’d like to try out the future of headless CMS, sign up here OR simply type the following one-liner into your terminal window:
npx create-payload-appP.S. If you’re a seed-stage DevOps or Developer-led landscape company or a venture capitalist investing in the space, we would love to hear from you!
