Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round.
Headless content management systems are a bit different from traditional content management systems. The backend and the frontend of your website operate totally separately. You write content in the backend where it is safely stored. The frontend of your application fetches content from the backend using an API and display it to your customers and readers.
Dissociating those two key parts of your content management system provides many advantages. It is more secure, it scales much better and it gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to frontend framework and hosting.
In addition to iterating on its CMS, Prismic manages the infrastructure for you. When you sign up, you don’t have to deploy the backend on your own server. You can connect to the admin interface and start building.
After that, your content is accessible through an API. It means that you can build your own website and fetch content from Prismic. You can also build a mobile app and use Prismic as your content backend for the news section.
You can pick your own framework and build your site through that framework. Prismic supports Gatsby, React.js, Next.js, Vue.js and more.
Prismic is also trying to popularize something called slices. Traditional content management systems let you create pages or posts. Each page uses the same header and footer. It’s just a unit of content enclosed in your website.
Slices are vertical sections of your websites, such as a banner at the top, a section with featured content, some related content, recent reviews, a newsletter sign-up form, etc. Developers can create their own custom slices using React.js, Vue.js and others.
After that, the content marketing team can mix and match slices as well as customize them whenever they’re creating a new page. It unlocks more potential and lets non-technical people create dynamic content for a website. Essentially, Prismic is adding some no-code features to its CMS with those slices.
“Prismic becomes a page builder for the marketing team. From there, they can access all sections of the site and can compose new pages by piecing together those slices and by adding content,” co-founder and CEO Sadek Drobi told me.
That concept in particular seems to have some potential. That’s why the company is raising some money. The startup generates revenue from subscriptions and targets small clients, such as web agencies, as well as big companies that subscribe to enterprise plans.
