If content is king, today's focus is on how the king is expanding his empire. Print and traditional media were first powered by websites, and now websites are powered by a rapidly expanding array of apps, social media platforms, and content created by artificial intelligence. Now a company building toward that content horizon has raised a major round of funding to expand its operations.
Storyblok, a Linz, Austria-based startup offering a content management system (CMS) for organizations built on a “headless” concept, has raised $80 million in a Series C round. The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates and those that facilitate a full-control approach, including building and maintaining the various components of the content and front-end tech stack.
The startup plans to use the funding to continue its further expansion into Europe and the US, as well as introduce new automation and AI tools.
Some of that momentum is already building. Alongside the funding announcement, Storyblok is releasing a beta version of Ideation Room, which the company describes as “a collaborative space within Storyblok where [users] “By leveraging AI to improve and realize content, we can collaboratively develop new ideas earlier in the creative process.”
Storyblok CEO and founder Dominik Ungerer said the company is working with OpenAI on AI tools, so expect to see AI being used to populate content on the platform as well as generative AI to make the platform more intuitive to use.
The company currently has 240 employees and plans to continue hiring more.
The company's new investor, Brighton Park Capital, is leading the Series C, which marks a sizeable raise for the startup, which raised a $47 million Series B in 2022. As with the previous round, the valuation wasn't disclosed, but the company said its user base has more than doubled since the last round, from 74,000 to 200,000 in 2022, so we understand this is definitely an “up round.”
Storyblok has raised $138 million to date.
Ungerer told TechCrunch that he expects the company to be profitable by the end of 2025.
“It's a huge market,” he said, estimating the larger opportunity for CMS companies like Contentful, WordPress and Commercetools (which focuses on e-commerce) at about $20 billion to $25 billion per year. “While content was once thought of as valuable for B2C brands connecting with consumers, it's now core to the strategy of almost every company in every industry,” he said. “The mass market is still dominated by legacy companies, with modern headless players like us making up only a small portion of it.”
A big selling point for Storyblok is that its service is used not only by developers (typically end users of CMS services) but also by non-technical employees. The company's customers include Adidas, T-Mobile, Renault, and alternative milk brand Oatly. In total, the company's platform hosts about 250,000 active projects.
Creators have long been challenged with building audiences and businesses through their content. More recently, the rise of AI has elevated this set of challenges to an existential crisis. What humans bring to the table when it comes to creativity has always been held sacred, but with the rise and sophistication of generative AI, will we still need humans tomorrow?
So far, Storyblocks has focused on putting human creators at the forefront, but a big question in the long term will be what role humans will play as they leverage AI to make the tool easier to use.
For now, Brighton Park's Kevin Magan says that's a strong enough proposition to back companies that are using AI for more direct assistance. “Almost all of our companies have AI built into their products or product roadmaps now,” he says. “We're not spending a lot of time on foundational models and things like that, but we feel strongly that AI will become a component of most application-level software.”
In addition to Brighton Park, previous backers HV Capital, Mubadala Capital, 3VC and First Minute Capital also participated in the Series C round.