The fledgling open source startup set out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured support for e-commerce giant eBay.
Wundergraph said it raised $7.5 million in Series A round funding today, and “expanding the open source GraphQL federation,” as the company was called.
Investors include eBay’s VC ARM eBay Ventures, Karma Ventures and Aspenwood Ventures. In addition to investing in startups, eBay also serves as a core design partner as Wundergraph sets up to build an open source alternative to Apollo’s GraphQL Company rival products.
“Wundergraph’s investment in highly performant open source platforms will boost eBay’s API ecosystem and enable sellers to work faster and smarter with products that help them thrive.”
Founded in 2020, Wundergraph is handicrafted by CTO Dustin Deus, CEO Jens Neuse, COO Björn Schwenzer and CCO Stefan Avram (pictured above, left to right).
Three of the company’s founding quartets are based in Germany, but the company has been founded in the US since its inception. Miami-based Avram joined the ranks in 2022 to confirm that the company has ground leadership in the US
There is an API for that
Uninitiated’s GraphQL is an API (Application Programming Interface) data query language developed in 2012 on Meta (then Facebook) as part of the transition from web wrappers to native mobile apps. The company opened GraphQL in 2015 and later moved the project to its own Foundation for the same name under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
Simply put, GraphQL allows clients (i.e. applications) to request the exact data they need, rather than fetching data too much. This requires bandwidth usage and cost, or underestimation. This makes it more efficient than traditional REST APIs.
More widely, GraphQL supports the API economy as software is drawn to microservices. Applications are grouped together as dedicated components that are easier to maintain than monoliths of code. However, as applications increase and the number of APIs increases, this can lead to difficult and cumbersome confusion that is difficult to organize at scale.
Wundergraph has gone through several iterations over the years. Initially, we built a Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to integrate multiple APIs, including databases such as GraphQL, REST, SOAP, and MySQL. Fast forward to 2023, the company raised a $3 million seed round to bolster the API revolution by building what it called “Github for APIs.”
Meanwhile, Apollo has raised a huge amount of money to promote the GraphQL federation effort. This is to help multiple teams work with larger applications as part of a distributed architecture and build graphs together. However, in the 2021 tail end, Apollo changed its federal products from an open source MIT license to its own “source-available” elastic license.
This is where Wundergraph saw the opportunity to attack.
“By the summer of 2023, we hadn’t received the necessary deals, so it was getting tough.
As the founders rushed to turn things around, they saw various sales memos and noticed that customers continued to mention changes to Apollo’s licenses.
“Our data showed that some people are actually looking for open source alternatives to the Apollo Federation,” Neuse said. “We thought the current approach wasn’t working, so let’s put out an open source alternative to the Apollo Federation.”
So, in the second half of 2023, Wundergraph debuted Cosmo for that explicit purpose.
eBay Factor
Like almost all vendor-led open source projects, Wundergraph is a core maintainer and contributor to open source efforts. In addition to COSMO, the company sells hosting and premium support and services. This may include databases, analysis, authentication, and observability integration.
Of course, large companies can build their own version of COSMO in-house. But if the central focus of a company is, for example, building an e-commerce market, it probably doesn’t have to develop and maintain every aspect of the stack. Use Cosmo instead and pay Wundergraph for support backed by a robust service level agreement (SLA).
This is where Wundergraph’s partnership with eBay proved fruitful. Essentially, eBay is a two-way process that gives you the flexibility of open source GraphQL federation to suit your needs, with Wundergraph taking design inputs directly from a globally scaled juggernaut.
“I think we are federal experts, but we have no experience with eBay scale issues,” explained Neuse. “And with this very close relationship, they taught us everything about how we build our products and how we can integrate into companies like eBay.
Such requirements may include integrating the company’s own systems and tools with COSMO, for example, if you wish to use only a portion of the product. This also convinced Neuse and Team that open source is the way if you want to attract well-known customers who don’t want to be trapped in their own products.
“They are [eBay] “The unique alternative is trying to move you into a walled garden ecosystem, which really helped transform COSMO into a product that can be used by large companies,” Neuse said. How can you attract everyone? It must be open source. There is no limit to how people use it. ”
With the new $7.5 million in the bank, Wundergraph says it plans to expand the existing 20 powerful workforce and double the open source GraphQL federation with additional tools that will help decentralized teams work smarter. This means better support for collaboration and governance among large companies.
“Open source is the future of API management, and businesses demand transparency, flexibility and control,” added co-founder Stefan Avram. “We are building plumbing essential to the world’s largest platform. This funding will allow us to expand while maintaining our commitment to open source development.”
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