Mermaid, an open-source diagramming and graphing tool, has long been popular among developers because it allows you to create diagrams using a Markdown-like language. As is often the case, Mermaid founder Knut Sveidqvist created this project because he saw a need for it in his own work as a software architect, and he opened it with no immediate plans to monetize it. I made it into a source. In 2022, he was approached by GitLab founder Sid Sibrandi's venture capital firm Open Core Ventures (OCV), which later teamed up with serial entrepreneur and investor Andrew Firestone as his CEO. I did.
The company, which builds hosted services around open source projects, has raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round from OCV, Sequoia, and Microsoft's M12 fund (plus about 12 angel investors). Announced.
There are some ironies in Microsoft's current investment in Mermaid. According to Sveidqvist, the initial inspiration for creating Mermaid was his lost Microsoft Visio file. “I had to redraw everything. So, on my way home, I thought there has to be a better way. It was also around the time Markdown was starting to become popular. Could we use this as text? was the idea. Later that night, I was sitting in the living room with my kids. They were watching TV, so I started a project. They were watching “The Little Mermaid.” I did. So we gave it that name eight years ago. ”
Early Mermaid was primarily about flowcharts, but over time Sveidqvist added other diagram types and the community soon made it their own. And it became quite popular. Firestone said his version of the open source project Cloud had 4 million users last year.
Image credit: Mermaid Chart
The OCV system looks for smart founders and popular projects and co-founds companies with them to commercialize those projects. This often means bringing in a CEO with business experience to complement what is typically a technical co-founder. Of course, these projects also have the advantage that they already have a proven track record, which significantly reduces the risk of investment.
“When you combine open source software with a venture studio model, a background like Sid Siebrandi, and capital, you get a seed-stage company that looks like a lot less risky.As a Series A. .It gave me so much perspective on the future of product-market fit, which was really special for me to join,” Firestone explained.
Firestone added that millions of non-technical users need diagramming and flowcharting tools. Mermaid Chart seeks to address this market by building easy-to-use tools for this group of users. But the overall vision is much bigger, and breaking something like Lucidchart or Miro isn't as important. Mermaid Chart said Firestone said he would like to pursue ServiceNow or similar workflow automation services. But that's still a long way off.
For now, the team is seriously focused on building the service and reaching a wider audience. However, once a company fully commits to his Mermaid Chart, this tool can become an important knowledge base, laying the foundation for realizing a company's broader process automation vision.
As a text-based tool, there's always been a relatively high barrier to entry, and the team is well aware of that. That's why the company recently added a visual editor as well. However, this is an opt-in feature. Users who prefer and prefer a text-based approach can still do so (and can freely switch between the two interfaces).
Additionally, to make Mermaid even more accessible, the team also trained its own AI model, allowing users to create graphs through a chat interface and more. If you are a paid user, he can also have the AI correct the diagrams if there are mistakes in the syntax.
“Mermaid's open core is used by millions of software engineers around the world, and its software is natively supported by GitLab, GitHub, and more,” said GitLab co-founder and CEO, Open Core Ventures. said founder Sijbrandij. “Mermaid Charts is expanding its community by leveraging AI as a catalyst to bring the benefits of mermaids to all types of business users. The use cases and business opportunities associated with this technology are significant, and we I’m excited to support the team in this next phase of growth.”
Correction: Between our first conversation with Mermaid Charts and today, the team has raised more money and added investors. The story has been updated to reflect that.