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headless CMS

Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS • ZebethMedia

Payload, which develops a headless open-source content management system (CMS), today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other investors include MongoDB Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Grand Ventures and Exceptional Capital, in addition to a number of angel investors. Unlike most CMS tools, Michigan-based Payload puts its emphasis on developers. Bootstrapped since 2021, the team behind the platform argues that typical app frameworks give developers the tools to create their backends but not the CMS-style user interfaces they would need to manage apps and their content. Image Credits: Payload “To devs, ‘content management system’ is usually a swear word. If an engineer gets assigned a CMS project, it’s less than thrilling. They want to avoid roadblocks, write code and build things they’re proud of — but existing CMS’s get in the way of that left and right,” said CEO James Mikrut, who co-founded the company together with Dan Ribbens (COO) and Elliot DeNolf (CTO). “We’re not competing with Webflow or Squarespace — rather, we’re going to give talented engineers a tool they can trust to build critical content infrastructure.” Instead of building another no-code CMS, the team went in the exact opposite direction and built something more akin to a framework than ‘just’ a pure headless CMS. To get started, developers describe their configuration for Payload in TypeScript and the service creates a Mongo database, sets up REST and GraphQL APIs, handles file storage, authentication and access control — and, of course, creates the admin UI, which defaults to a clean, minimalist look. The company is currently in the middle of its first launch week, a concept that seems to be making the rounds among startups these days. Earlier this year, the team also launched version 1.0 and now that it has raised its first funding round, the plan is to expand the team and invest in the open-source community around Payload. And like most open-source startups, the company plans to launch a managed service, Payload Cloud, to power its monetization strategy and function as a hub for deploying Payload apps.

Contentstack raises $80M to grow its headless CMS platform for the enterprise • ZebethMedia

The market for enterprise content management systems (CMS) is steeply growing as the need to organize and manage documents, images and other forms of digital content increases. According to Allied Market Research, the entire CMS sector combined could be worth $53.2 billion by 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2020. While the concept of CMS has been around for decades, a relatively new innovation — so-called headless CMS — is beginning to attract both market share and the interest of investors. Headless CMS systems act primarily as content repositories, managing back-end infrastructure while affording plenty of customization on the front end. They’re similar to widgets or plug-ins on a website; a headless CMS is usually combined with a separate presentation layer that handles the design and structure elements, templates and the like. Contentstack is one of several vendors offering a headless CMS geared toward enterprise customers. The company today announced that it raised $80 million in a Series C round co-led by Georgian and Insight Partners, which also saw participation from Illuminate Ventures. Having raised $169 million to date, Contentstack plans to put the funding toward customer acquisition, geographic expansion, new partnerships and product development, CEO Neha Sampat tells ZebethMedia. “Contentstack empowers marketers and developers to deliver composable digital experiences at the speed of their imagination through automated headless CMS technology,” Sampat said via email. “Composable architectures ensure that enterprises can innovate swiftly, deploy new features rapidly, and remain agile in the face of digital disruption. Nobody gets ‘stuck’ with monolithic systems that don’t grow with the business or the world.” Contentstack, which was founded in 2018, was created on the back of fifteen-year-old consulting firm Raw Engineering and Built.io, an app development platform that Raw Engineering launched in 2013. (Closing the loop, Contentstack eventually bought the CMS division of Raw Engineering in 2018). Sampat — who co-founded Built.io — teamed up with Nishant Patel, the former VP of engineering at Software AG (which ended up acquiring Built.io) and Built.io’s second co-founder, to launch Contentstack. A look at Contentstack’s CMS platform for enterprises, which leans into workflow automation and customization. Image Credits: Contentstack Contentstack competes with headless CMS vendors, including Storyblok, which raised $47 million in May for its CMS aimed at nontechnical users, and Prismic, which recently raised $20 million to build out its fully managed CMS. (An interesting data point: VCs have invested over $118 million in CMS startups in the last year alone.) Strapi and Kontent are among the startup’s other rivals. But Sampat makes the case that Contentstack is the only CMS offering automation capabilities that don’t require code. Using the workflows in Contentstack, users can review, approve and publish content across their organization. A marketplace offers a hub for extensions, apps and integrations built by customers, partners and the company’s own engineering team. “Typically, content management requires a lot of backend development and programming skills. There is a risk that comes with that, for example, the risk of breaking other processes, enduring the cumbersome and lengthy requirements to implement the solution into the tech stack, and a lack of flexibility to change or maintain the flow of content,” Sampat said. “With Contentstack’s composable architecture, enterprises can tailor their martech stack and tools to their unique brand, team and customer experience needs quickly and easily unlocking the full potential of a composable tech stack.” Is Contentstack’s platform that much easier to use than the competition’s? Perhaps. Data shows, however, that many organizations struggle to use CMS to its full potential regardless of the vendor. In a 2021 survey released by the Content Marketing Institute, 56% of employees said that integration issues stymied their implementation of CMS while 55% blamed a lack of training. The company, which has more than 400 employees, appears to have won over enterprises regardless, though, with a client base that includes Shell, JPMorgan Chase, HP, McDonald’s and Mattel and several unnamed public sector agencies. The company claims to have doubled its customers since last summer and surpassed 50,000 users on the platform. “The pandemic and recent economic pressure has generated a major shift in the market, causing enterprises to review the performance of their existing digital investments and shift focus to efficiency. Ultimately, this means enterprises now have a higher standard for the return on investment in digital investments,” Sampat continued. “For digital strategy, having a composable architecture enables the speed to iterate and keep up with the constantly changing conditions and demands. Contentstack is well-positioned to empower these digital leaders to outperform through a ‘value- and success-based’ approach coupled with a proven path to a modern, composable architecture that will scale and adapt for the long term.”

Acquia jumps on headless CMS bandwagon with open source starter kit • ZebethMedia

Over the last decade or so, content management systems have evolved from monolithic systems managed by IT to a set of services made available to developers through an API. The more modern approach separates the presentation layer on the front end from the management on the back end. Today, Acquia, the company behind the open source Drupal project, announced its official entry into the headless CMS market, and not surprisingly it’s based on Drupal and open source. The company is calling this offering a “starter kit,” a way to take advantage of headless features as needed, says Jim Shaw, SVP and GM for Drupal at Acquia. “If you come to Acquia and you’re starting a digital experience project, we normally offer you Acquia CMS as the starting point to start with Drupal. But now we’re also offering a headless kit inside of that, so that you can use headless features to move content through an API,” Shaw told ZebethMedia. He points out that while it is releasing the headless kit, the company sees this as part of a hybrid strategy that includes the full-blown Acquia CMS working together with the headless piece. “And for us this is less about having a dedicated headless product that only does headless. It’s about having those capabilities available from the platform that allows you to do hybrid as well as headless,” he said. In fact, Shaw doesn’t see many customers going full-on headless. “I think it’s unlikely that people will go 100% headless, that they will have only headless use cases. I think what we see is people doing both, and as a result what we’re doing is we’re we’re building these capabilities inside the Acquia platform,” he said. In addition to the headless starter kit, the company is also introducing a kit for next.js, an open source web development framework, to help developers build a front end too. “[We’re also offering] a starter kit for next.js that primes the pump in terms of getting a next.js front end working with a headless back end,” he said. He says some customers have been taking this approach on their own, and the company wanted to build something to make it easier to do this without building a full-blown product. “So that’s why we offering these are starter kits, not entire new product. They are layers inside, things that we have that then allow our customers — and hopefully new customers — to accelerate those headless projects on our platform and still have all the options available to them in terms of having a hybrid approach available as well.” The two kits are being announced today at Acquia Engage, the company’s customer conference taking place in Miami this week. The kits will be available for download today.

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