Venture Capital

Apollo GraphQL Lands $130 Million Series D

SAN FRANCISCO — Apollo GraphQL, a pioneer in the use of open source and commercial GraphQL API technologies, has landed a $130 million Series D funding round led by New York-based venture capital firm Insight Partners with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures.

Additional investors Next47 and Hatim Shafique, Chief Customer Officer at DataBricks, also participated.

 

Leveraging the explosive GraphQL movement, Apollo is pioneering the Graph as an essential new layer in the tech stack that serves as a unified representation of an organization’s services, data, and digital capabilities. The Graph empowers developers to deliver better experiences, faster; isolates service complexity; and serves as a single place for application development collaboration, without coupling.

The desire for the Graph is evident in Apollo’s rapid growth, with over 30% of Fortune 500 companies already using Apollo. Today, Apollo processes over 6 billion queries daily on its platform and enterprise annual recurring revenue (ARR) nearly tripled over the last 12 months.

Customers include Walmart, Expedia, Glassdoor, Audi, and PayPal.

“The Graph is a developer-driven movement to change how companies build software, and Apollo is leading in supporting application developers, the primary value creators in software,” says Geoff Schmidt, cofounder and CEO of Apollo GraphQL. “Every company will need a graph strategy to keep pace in the digital era the same way they need a cloud strategy. This round is a win for all application developers, who can expect increased support for our open source community, as well as our forward-looking customers.”

“Under Apollo’s leadership, the Graph has the potential to reshape the world economy as a universal aggregator. Estimates are that there are already millions of GraphQL developers, and the number has been growing exponentially,” said Lonne Jaffe, Insight Partners. “Embracing the Graph is one of those key technology strategy decisions that will have huge implications for a company’s future competitiveness, like adopting the public cloud or leveraging data to make predictions.”

“Apollo has brought the revolutionary technology of GraphQL to the enterprise through its commitment to the open source community and making the Graph a foundational pillar to the tech stack,” said David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Apollo’s mission and growth serves as a force multiplier for developers everywhere to have a bigger impact and change the way companies build software. It’s a different way of thinking about how to build applications that developers are adopting at a rapid pace.”

Apollo’s Graph Platform enables organizations to build and scale a graph safely, and overcome the complexity of application development. That complexity stifles innovation and holds companies back from delivering products at velocity. With the Graph, companies can drive unfair advantage, and accelerate product velocity and platform innovation.

“Using Apollo’s Graph, Expedia rebuilt its entire trips experience three times faster than our old approach. Adding new trip features to all our apps now takes days rather than months,” said Rick Fast, Vice President of Engineering at Expedia.