Contentstack Inc., which has its CEO and more than a dozen employees in Austin, said Nov. 15 it has raised $80 million in fresh capital.
The series C round was co-led by Georgian and Insight Partners, with additional money from Illuminate Ventures. As part of the deal, Georgian’s Emily Walsh will join the company's board, along with Contentstack Chief Financial Officer David Overmyer.
Contentstack has developed a content experience platform that helps website operators manage a wide variety of features, such as blogs, videos and interactive graphics, as well as quickly develop personalized experiences. Its customers have included Chase, Holiday Inn, McDonald's and Shell. It's part of an expanding niche with competitors such as Uberflip, Kontent and Storyblok.
The software startup, which lists San Francisco as its headquarters, is a remote-first company with more than 400 total employees. It currently has 18 people in Austin, including co-founder and CEO Neha Sampat and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Nishant Patel. It has 14 employees in the Bay Area, plus more at offices in Amsterdam and India. The company has about 25 job openings posted on its website, largely for remote positions or for its offices in India in product development and sales.
Sampat and Patel, both co-founders at prior company Built.io, launched Contentstack in 2018. Since raising a $57.5 million series B round last year, Contentstack has doubled its number of customers, with more than 50,000 users overall. It has raised a total of about $169 million in funding.
"We started Contentstack years ago because other solutions in the market did not meet the growing demand for cloud, omnichannel, and ease of working with other technologies," stated Neha Sampat, Contentstack’s founder and CEO. "Embracing composable means embracing change, empowering teams, getting more bang for your buck, and continuing to win in a tough economic environment. With the best composable content platform and the industry's best customer care, Contentstack is determined to help companies on their path."
Sampat this year won one of Austin Business Journal's Best CEO Awards, as voted on by a panel of business leaders and past winners. The honor recognized her signing of the Insight Partners ScaleUp CEO DE&I Pledge — a commitment to diverse recruiting practices and actions that promote an inclusive company culture. The company said 25% of its employees are underrepresented minorities, and it runs its job postings through a program called Gender Decoder, which helps remove bias and ensure that its applications feature gender-inclusive language.
Contentstack's big funding comes as financing for startups wanes and inflation, interest rates and market volatility cause venture capitalists to be more cautious with valuations and growth targets.
Austin-area startups raised $701 million in this year's third quarter across 70 deals, according to PitchBook and National Venture Capital Association data. That was down from $850 million raised across 96 deals in Q2.
The PitchBook/NVCA Venture Monitor report found that late-stage deals — those for more mature companies with proven track records — were being especially impacted, with total dollars invested down 48% from the prior quarter and at a 11-quarter low.
