The round, led by True Ventures, comes after a breakout year for Directus as developers and business users alike turn to its open data platform to power digital experiences at scale
Directus, an open source software company focused on democratizing data across the enterprise, announced that it raised $7 million in Series A financing to build the industry’s first open data platform, which instantly adds an API and beautiful no-code app to any SQL database. True Ventures led the round with participation from seed investor Handshake Ventures.
Many of the world’s most innovative organizations, including Bose, Adobe, and Tripadvisor, turn to Directus to power and scale their digital experiences and internal data tools. The company offers a fully open source, extensible platform that enables developers and business users alike to maximize the value of their organization’s data. By empowering anyone within a company to browse, manage and visualize all business data, Directus helps reduce development time for data-driven projects by 40 to 60 percent. The first-of-its-kind platform goes beyond backend-as-a-service and headless CMS capabilities, with use cases ranging from SaaS to IoT, websites and digital experiences, apps and games, AR/VR, internal tools, business intelligence, and countless other possibilities.
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“We have embraced a ‘hub and spoke’ approach within the data landscape that positions Directus as a single point of access and automation to better support companies adopting modern microservice architectures,” said Ben Haynes, co-founder and CEO of Directus. “Our truly agnostic platform seamlessly fits into the data and technology stack of any organization, whether it’s an international airline working to improve airport check-ins with innovative digital kiosks or a global fitness brand looking to streamline online class scheduling around the world. This funding will enable us to continue delivering high-quality software, expand our cloud service offering, and provide essential resources to the community of users that have entrusted us with their projects.”
The Directus platform, which is 100 percent JavaScript, installs on top of any new or existing SQL database, instantly delivering powerful developer tools and an intuitive no-code app for business users, all without any migration required or proprietary vendor lock-in. Non-technical users are enabled to safely access, manage, and visualize data like never before in a collaborative studio, all without the assistance of IT. Engineers benefit from automatic REST+GraphQL APIs and a developer toolkit that includes built-in authentication, granular permissions, custom data workflows, automation and alerting, reporting and analytics, and more.
“Tripadvisor is using Directus to bring our products, data and content closer together. This will allow our users to plan and experience travel in new and innovative ways,” said Antoine Veliz, VP at Tripadvisor.
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The funding comes during a time of monumental, global growth for the company. Directus grew in the past year from just two team members to over twenty today with hundreds of contributors. The platform now has over 20 million downloads and more than 18,000 GitHub stars, with a community of over 50 thousand developers and enterprise customers spanning nearly every industry, including financial services, consumer technology, travel, digital agencies, government, and more. Responding to user demand, the company introduced Directus Cloud — the cloud version of its open data platform — in March 2022, as well as premium support options and additional product extensions.
“Empowering non-technical users with no-code tools is a massive shift underway in the corporate world,” said True Ventures Co-founder Phil Black, who will join the Directus Board of Directors as the company enters this next stage of growth. “Directus is an open source project that has been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. Among many benefits, the software helps teams greatly reduce the hours developers might spend creating data-driven projects. What’s more, we like how the founding team spent time deep in this problem prior to starting Directus. Hands-on struggle begets innovation.”
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