WunderGraph raises $7.5M to scale its open source API platform with help from eBay

By Riley Kaminer

When Stefan Avram joined WunderGraph in 2022, the company was at a crossroads. The founding team had already built tools to help developers wrangle multiple APIs – REST, GraphQL, MySQL, SOAP – but the market wasn’t biting like they hoped.

“By the summer of 2023, it was getting tough, because we weren’t getting the deals we needed and the whole operation wasn’t going in the direction we wanted it to,” CEO Jens Neuse said in an interview with TechCrunch.

What changed? A licensing switch from one of their biggest competitors.

Apollo, the best-known player in the GraphQL federation world, had shifted from open source to a proprietary license. It was a subtle move, but it opened a door. WunderGraph quickly realized that many developers and companies were looking for an alternative – one that remained fully open source.

“Our data showed that some people were really looking for an open source alternative to Apollo Federation,” Neuse said. “We figured our current approach is not working, so let’s just put out an open source alternative.”

The result was Cosmo, WunderGraph’s open source GraphQL federation platform, launched in late 2023. It’s a product designed to help companies manage sprawling APIs in a world increasingly built on microservices. Think of it as connective tissue for complex software systems, except this time, it’s open source and accessible.

That bet has now paid off.

WunderGraph just raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by eBay Ventures, with additional backing from Karma Ventures and Aspenwood Ventures. eBay is also using the product and shaping its development.

“Our investment in WunderGraph’s highly performant open source platform will help boost eBay’s API ecosystem and enable our teams to work faster and smarter in building products that help our sellers thrive,” commented Bryan Woodruff, eBay’s VP of seller experience engineering.

WunderGraph’s founding team is mostly based in Germany, but Miami-based Avram has played a key role in expanding the company’s U.S. presence. He now serves as Chief Commercial Officer and brings boots-on-the-ground leadership as WunderGraph scales in North America.

The partnership with eBay gives the company something most startups never get: direct feedback from a global enterprise that actually needs their product to perform at scale. That has helped WunderGraph fine-tune Cosmo into something enterprise-ready.

“I would say we are experts in federation, but we don’t have experience in eBay-scale problems,” Neuse said. “And so by having this very close relationship, they taught us everything in terms of how we need to build our product so that it can be integrated into companies like eBay.”

For WunderGraph, the funding represents a chance to double down on its open source ethos and build tools that help distributed engineering teams collaborate better. Neuse believes that openness is the only way to attract large customers who don’t want to be trapped in someone else’s software ecosystem.

“[eBay] really helped us turn Cosmo into a product that can be used by any large enterprise, because proprietary alternatives try to move you into a walled garden ecosystem,” Neuse said. “This market needs to be as wide as possible. How can we attract everybody? It must be open source. We cannot limit how people use it.”

Avram summed it up simply: “We’re building the essential plumbing for the world’s biggest platforms, and this funding allows us to scale while keeping our commitment to open source development.”

READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:

Author
Recent Posts

Riley Kaminer

I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.