Prisma offers an open-source ORM and server-side library that lets developers write in their preferred languages while interoperating across an organization’s apps. It began with a focus on GraphQL and now supports JavaScript and TypeScript and databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server, MongoDB and CockroachDB. The Prisma ORM, launched last year, has over 150,000 developers using it for Node.js and TypeScript projects and is growing at an average rate of 10% monthly. Prisma’s leadership (co‑founders Søren Bramer Schmidt and Johannes Schickling) is based in Berlin and plans to keep investing in the open-source tool to expand its user base. The company intends to launch its first commercial products — described as an “Application Data Platform” — later this year as the start of revenue generation. The recent fundraising will be used to accelerate those product efforts and broader business expansion. Prisma provides an open-source unified data access layer that abstracts database infrastructure to simplify how application developers access data. The company has released Prisma 2.0 after more than a year of preview and beta testing and says the version is ready for production. Prisma 2.0 is inspired by systems used at Twitter, Facebook and Airbnb and aims to democratize that pattern for teams of all sizes. To sustain its open-source work, Prisma plans to build commercial services that enable development teams and organizations to collaborate better on projects using Prisma. Financially, Prisma completed a $12 million Series A led by Amplify Partners and previously raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins in 2018. The company was founded in 2016 and operates from offices in Berlin and San Francisco under CEO Johannes Schickling and CTO Søren Bramer Schmidt. Prisma is an open-source infrastructure startup (formerly Graphcool) building a GraphQL data layer that maps and unifies access to multiple databases. The company released “Prisma 1.0” under an Apache 2 license after pivoting away from a narrower Backend-as-a-Service model. Its core product currently plugs into MySQL and Postgres and the roadmap includes support for MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra. Prisma also offers Prisma Enterprise for security workflows (compliance, access control, audit logging) and Prisma Cloud for team collaboration and database management. The startup operates out of a Berlin engineering base and is opening a San Francisco office to grow its team. Prisma is led by co-founder and CEO Johannes Schickling.

Total raised

$57M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

May 2022