At the intersection of GraphQL and building applications at the edge, Grafbase adds $5 million to the seed column

Stockholm-based self-titled “data platform for developers”, Grafbase has raised $5 million in a seed round led by Next47. With the $5 million, the startup plans to ramp up product development and double the team size over the coming months. Since September 2021, Grafbase has garnered a total of $7.3 million.

Alongside Next47’s lead, the round also drew the participation of Alven, Uncorrelated Ventures, and a group of angel investors including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann Christensen, and Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, and other undisclosed figures.

"Building and deploying backends has been complex and time-consuming for years. We have built Grafbase to make deployment of GraphQL backends seamless and blazingly fast,” says founder and CEO Fredrik Björk. With Grafbase, developer teams can create a GraphQL endpoint with a complete backend, including application(s) and database. All projects deployed to Grafbase come with a globally replicated serverless database that is seamlessly integrated into every GraphQL API.”

Grafbase hails from a not-so-shabby background, for if the name Fredrik Björk rings any bells, you might remember that he served as CTO at TheRealReal (Nasdaq: REAL, IPO 2019), and was the founder and CTO at Avatars United, an early forerunner to what we’re now terming the metaverse, and property that was acquired by Linden Lab, arguably the forerunner of the metaverse in it’s Second Life, in 2010.

On the investment Next47 Partner Micah Smurthwaite commented, “Grafbase is at the heart of two powerful trends: GraphQL and building applications at the edge. There are millions of GraphQL developers and the Graph is changing how companies build software. Distributed networks, such as Cloudflare Workers, are allowing developers to build applications at the edge, closer to the end user. With Grafbase, developers can create a single GraphQL endpoint with a fully-featured backend that is replicated at the edge, globally. That’s very powerful and is changing how software is built.”