If content is king, then the focus today is on how the king is expanding the empire: print and traditional media were first augmented by websites, and now websites are augmented by a rapidly growing landscape of apps, social media platforms, and content created by artificial intelligence. Now a company building that content horizon has raised a big round of funding to expand its operations.
Storyblok, a startup from Linz, Austria, that provides a content management system (CMS) for organizations based on the “headless” concept, has closed an $80 million Series C round. The startup aims for a middle ground between platforms that offer rigid standards and those that facilitate a full-control approach that can include creating and maintaining different elements of a content stack and front-end technology.
The startup plans to use the funds to continue expanding further in Europe and the US and bring new automation and artificial intelligence tools into the mix.
Some of these are already gaining momentum: Along with the funding announcement, Storyblok is launching its Ideation Room beta. The company describes it as “a collaboration space within Storyblok where [users] can develop new ideas together early in the creation process, using artificial intelligence to help improve content and bring it to life.”
Dominik Angerer, CEO and founder of Storyblok, said that the company was working with OpenAI on this AI tool, so expect to see some generative AI at work not only to make the platform more intuitive to use, but and possibly supplement the content on the platform.
The company now has a staff of 240 and will increase recruitment.
Brighton Park Capital, a new investor in the company, is leading the Series C. This is a significant raise for the startup, which last raised a $47 million Series B in 2022. As with this latest round, it did not disclose its valuation , but it says its users have more than doubled since the last round to 200,000 from 74,000 in 2022, and we understand that this is definitely an “up round.”
Storyblok has raised $138 million to date.
Angerer told TechCrunch that he expects the company to be profitable around the end of 2025.
“It’s a huge market,” he said, estimating that the biggest opportunity for CMS players — which include others like Contentful, WordPress and Commercetools (focused on e-commerce) — is about $20 billion to $25 billion a year. “People used to think that content was valuable for B2C brands connecting with their consumers, but increasingly, it’s at the core of strategy for almost every company in every industry,” he said. “The mass market is still controlled by legacy companies, with modern headless players like us only getting a percentage.”
Storyblok’s big selling point is that its services are used not only by developers – usually the end customers of CMS services – but also by non-technical workers. Its clients include Adidas, T-Mobile, Renault and alt-milk brand Oatly. In total, its platform hosts around 250,000 active projects.
Creators have long faced the challenges of building an audience, and therefore a business, out of content. These days, this set of challenges has evolved into something of an existential crisis thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. There has always been something sacred about what a human brings to the equation when it comes to creativity, but with the rise and increasing sophistication of genetic artificial intelligence, will humans really be needed tomorrow?
Storyblok has so far focused on putting the human creator front and center. But with AI making its tools easier to use, the big question will be what role these humans play in the long run.
For now, it’s a big enough proposition to support companies using AI for more immediate help, said Kevin Magan of Brighton Park. “Almost all of our companies have AI as a significant part of their product today or their product roadmap,” he said. “We don’t spend a lot of time on a lot of the fundamental models and things like that, but we strongly believe that AI will be a component of most application-level software.”
In addition to Brighton Park, previous backers HV Capital, Mubadala Capital, 3VC and Firstminute Capital also participated in the Series C round.
