It takes a village: Announcing our series B

Written by Magnus Hillestad, Even Westvang, Simen Svale

Today we’re proud to share that we’ve raised a $39 million Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Lead Edge Capital as well as existing investors Threshold Ventures, Heavybit Industries, Alliance Venture, and Monochrome Capital.

ICONIQ has a long track record of supporting ambitious founders with investments such as Datadog, Snowflake, Braze, Gitlab, Notion, Airtable and Zoom. We are proud to welcome ICONIQ General Partner, Doug Pepper, to our board of directors.

Since raising our Series A last year, we've experienced tremendous momentum: a 3x growth in customers and a more than 2x increase in our user base. We've never felt better about our vision for the ultimate content platform as we see Sanity redefining the way our customers work with content in powerful ways. This funding is a huge milestone for our product, our community, our customers, and our team!

Here's how we got here and what's next for Sanity.

First time founders obsess over product

“First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution,” Justin Kan wrote on Twitter in 2018. There’s no doubt a company’s first hurdle is to create a great product that solves real problems. Ideally, something that delights its users on a regular basis. As first time founders, we had that obsession with product experience.

We were convinced that organizations needed better surfaces for customer interaction, and that the most innovative companies wanted new ways to use content, not only in marketing, but converging marketing and product to build amazing product experiences. Our solution was to treat content as data. (Read more about our vision for structured content here.)

Treating content as data means that content is approached programmatically. You should be able to query for content based on how rich text is marked up, or by whatever relationships exists between content types. Because Sanity separates content from presentation, you can deliver content from a single source of truth to any application or device. In the first years of Sanity, this was all we cared about, as we laid the foundation for a new way of working with content:

“Sanity is a Structured Content platform for modern developers, enabling rapid development and iteration. An open source editor lets you create completely custom interfaces and content workflows while Sanity’s real-time API lets you deliver content from a single source to any channel, device or product.”

Planting the seeds for distribution

While product has always been our core priority, we also saw the power of distribution (and why wait to become a second-time founder to appreciate it?). The real fun in delivering a product is seeing the community that grows around it and uses it in imaginative new ways to build amazing things. So from the beginning we’ve been obsessed with community, distribution and product-led growth. With a community that is quickly approaching 100k developers and content creators, as well as numerous Fortune 500 companies, we are on a path to ubiquitous adoption of Sanity:

“Our goal is to give all developers and organizations, large and small, a platform that treats Content as Data to build amazing digital experiences. We target modern developers and teams that dream of building better content experiences, on any application or device.”

Being Inevitable takes a village

“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense,” - Jonathan Ive

We believe great products become inevitable. Our vision is to fundamentally change how the world works with content. That is a huge undertaking, and even with the right product, and a strong foundation for distribution, it takes a village to get there.

We are amazed at what we have been able to achieve with a team of less than 50 people. The passion, dedication, and talent they bring to the table has helped us achieve more in a few years than we could ever have expected when we started this journey. With this new funding, we are ready to significantly expand this organization to deliver on the product and distribution.

What you can expect from Sanity going forward

We have been focused on pushing the boundaries of what people expect from a CMS. We will continue to do so. Here are some things that you can expect from us going forward:

1. Content is Data. Operate from a single source of truth:

We believe that content needs to be approached programmatically and interoperated with other data to create amazing digital experiences. We will continue to invest in features and tooling that enable this vision in order to give you content velocity and content integrity.

2. An extensible editor, made for plugins and customization:

Our open source Sanity Studio is the most flexible and extensible content authoring tool on the market. It has always been open source and extensible and we will continue to invest in making it easier, faster, and more delightful to get started and to build amazing content user interfaces.

3. An amazing and inclusive community:

We’re blown away by our community. With over 15k people in our Slack community, we see a constant flow of amazing showcases, plugins and snippets. The feedback and help people give there have been crucial in order to understand how people build on our platform. We will continue to invest in your ability to make plugins, to share ideas and explore innovative content solutions with the community. We will also continue our investment in making our community inclusive and diverse. We believe a diverse community is a fundamental success factor for Sanity going forward. Everyone is welcome.

Thank you. Now, come join us!

We have come a long way but have only just started. We are incredibly thankful for all the support we are receiving from our community, from our customers and from our partners. We will continue to invest in these relationships, and double down our efforts.

We are hiring! We continue to be obsessed with building a strong sustainable team. We regularly update Sanity.io/careers with new opportunities. If you don't see what you are looking for, don't be shy: let us know on jobs@sanity.io that you’re interested in joining our team and what you’d like to do!

We are only just getting started!