Hasura, the Bengaluru and San Francisco-based startup which helps businesses cut down product development effort by automating API development, has raised a fresh $100 million in funding led by Greenoaks at a valuation to $1 billion, joining the unicorn club.

Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures also backed the investment.

The startup's total fund tally now stands at $136.5 million. Led by CEO Tanmai Gopal, Hasura plans to deploy the fresh capital to accelerate research and development and expand go-to-market activities globally for the company's GraphQL Engine, it said in a statement on Tuesday. The GraphQL Engine is an open source product that essentially generates GraphQL APIs without developers having to build them from scratch.

A portion of the capital raised will also be earmarked for India where it plans to build on the local engineering and product teams. Hasura has 48 employees in the country.

With operational data increasingly distributed among multiple sources and developers consuming data in insecure and unauthorised compute environments, Hasura provides data APIs that are able to connect to multiple services and data sources, embed domain-specific authorisation logic, and provide the necessary security and performance, the company explains.

"Over the last few years, we've worked closely with our users and customers to address a massive gap in delivering and consuming data via an API standard that developers love – GraphQL. With this funding round, our investors and the Hasura team are doubling down on our vision to solve data access and unlock the next decade of developer productivity. We're going to be addressing the needs of our users by adding support for their favorite data systems much faster," says CEO Tanmai Gopal.

Hasura claims it has been downloaded more than 400 million times since its launch in 2018.

Neil Shah, partner at Greenoaks, says that since the launch of their GraphQL engine in 2018, Hasura has witnessed massive uptake across organisations ranging from grassroots open source projects to some of the largest companies in the world. "The common thread is substantial improvements in developer productivity and decreased time to market for mission-critical applications. Now, Hasura Cloud has taken this a step further, truly democratising GraphQL, and letting anyone access their data with speed and simplicity," says Shah.

Hasura claims that it is designed to make web application development faster—the platform cuts down the time and niche expertise required to build GraphQL APIs for data access by automating the repetitive work involved in mapping models to APIs with common access patterns like pagination, filtering, joining, setting up authorisation rules, and optimising performance.

Hasura unicorn

New unicorn: Hasura's valuation hits $1 billion