🐲 Backing Prismic
Overlooked #70
Hi, it’s Alexandre from Eurazeo (ex. Idinvest). I’m investing in seed & series A consumer and consumer enablers startups all over Europe. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about underrated trends in the European tech industry. Today, we’re announcing that we are co-leading Prismic’s series A together with Aglaé to support them in their journey build the next Wordpress.
We are thrilled to co-lead Prismic's $20m series A together with our friends at Aglaé. Prismic is not your everyday series A.
Prismic was founded in 2013 as a spin-off of a Paris-based tech agency called Zengularity.
Prismic was a bootstrapped company that managed to reach several millions in ARR and attract 4k+ customers & 140k users on their own.
Prismic has built a team of 40 people from 16 different nationalities.
Prismic is led by a CEO with a super inspiring personal story.
Prismic is acquiring customers on Twitch and Youtube.
We love, admire and value this singularity.
We believe that Prismic's Slice based website builders will become the standard to create websites in the next decade and we are excited to participate in the company's journey.
What is Prismic? What is a Slice-based website builder?
Any website can be divided into sections. More and more companies are implementing a design system with design components that change depending on the website section. Prismic has built a website builder around this idea of sections that they call Slices. Slices are powerful because you have to develop them once and then your marketing and content team can play with them to create an infinite number of pages. Let's take a concrete exemple with DigitalOcean.
Digital Ocean is a Prismic’s customer.
You can divide its website into sections that Prismic calls Slices.
Slices are independent and are basically design components that designers craft once and developers build once.
Prismic allows Digital Ocean's content writers and marketers to combine Slices like they want to build an infinite number of pages for their websites without being dependent the design and the developer teams. DigitalOcean uses Prismic to design and develop Slices once and then combine them to build an infinite number of pages.
Why is Prismic so Unique?
1/ Sadek, Prismic's founder and CEO, is an exceptional entrepreneur. Sadek was born in Syria. He discovered computing in his early years in the 80s and convinced his family to send him to Armenia to study engineering. Then, Sadek pursued its study and started his career in France. He created a web framework called Play2 and moved to the U.S. for 1y to help LinkedIn implement it. While working for a web agency called Zengularity, Sadek and other colleagues built a headless CMS. In 2017, 7 employees (“the traitorous seven”) decided to spin-off a product from Zengularity and start a proper company.
2/ Prismic has been bootstrapped since its creation in 2017. The founding team managed to build a team of 40 exceptional people from 16 different nationalities, attracted 4k+ customers and crafted a uniquely positioned product that has evolved from a headless CMS to a Slice-based website builder.
3/ Prismic's product has a unique ability to serve both marketers / content editors and developers. We believe that Prismic is leading a new wave of Content Management Systems (aka the tool to manage web content allowing contributors to create, edit and publish content on the web) :
CMS (WordPress, Drupal): content managers can build their own websites without developers with custom templates but the websites are monolithic and have poor SEO and performance.
Headless CMS (Contentful, Strapi, Sanity): developers can choose their own tech stack, can build much more customised experiences and can display the content on multiple platforms (websites, apps, IoT etc.).
Slice-based CMS (Prismic): developers build once slices (web components like headers, customer references, sliders, forms etc.) and content/marketing teams are able to build independently an infinite number of pages based on these slices. A modern CMS should be able to serve both the developer and the content manager/marketing personas. Most headless CMS are choosing to adopt a developer-first experience and are failing to take into consideration the needs of content manager and marketing people.
4/ Prismic is building a unique community of developers, marketers and content editors over the world.
Prismic is best in class in community building. During our due diligence, we were impressed by the wide ecosystem around Prismic:
Users are writing blogposts on how they use Prismic: look at why Malt decided to pick Prismic over Strapi and Contentful as a website builder for its new brand or look at how Cazoo integrated Prismic to increase the performance of its website
People are building courses to showcase how to use Prismic: see this course to build websites with Gatsby, Netlify and Prismic or this course on how to build an an immersive creative website from scratch
Large e-commerce platforms are talking about Prismic in their earning calls: look at the last BigCommerce's earning call mentioning the importance of using Prismic as a combination to its ecommerce engine to win customers
Users are contributing to Prismic's repositories on Github
Slicemachine: an initiative for developers to create their own web components for Prismic Developers and customers love to talk about how they use Prismic on Twitter
The Prismic's team has been brillant in building and nurturing this ecosystem. Every month, Prismic organizes product meetups. They have one of the best Youtube channels if you want to learn more about website development. Alex who joined Prismic recently is even animating three weekly Twitch shows to push this community building one step forward (Component Carousel, Horsin' Around and SliceZone).
What’s Next?
The series A funding will be used to:
Support Prismic in its mutation from a cash-constraint bootstrap mode to a time constraint venture backed mode. Prismic is currently structuring its team, tools and processes to be able to accelerate its growth.
Double the size of the team. Prismic is actively recruiting in sales, product, development and support functions. We are especially focused on recruiting a head of people and a head of engineering. If you are interested or if you know someone who could be interested by the challenge, please do send me an email at adewez@eurazeo.com. 🙏
Deliver Prismic's ambitious product roadmap. The company is working on many ambitious yet secret product evolutions and we can't wait to tell you more about them!
Launch a fashion brand featuring Sadek's clothes including his dragon's jacket on an ecommerce website powered by beautiful Prismic's product pages.
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋