Web development platform Netlify today announced that it has acquired its competitor Gatsby, the company behind the opensource GatsbyJS framework. Gatsby, which had raised a total of $46.8 million, including a $28 million Series B led by Index Ventures in 2020, never quite got the traction that competitors like Netlify itself or Vercel saw in recent years, despite seeing solid growth of its commercial cloud platform. Meanwhile, Netlify now has customers like Twilio, Mattel and Verizon and hosts more than 3 million developers on its platform, according to its own data. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price.
A year or two ago, we would’ve put all of these companies under the “JAMStack” monicker, where JAM stands for JavaScript, API and Markup — a term coined by Netlify co-founder and CEO Mathias Biilmann. Today, you’ll get a cheery email from their PR firms if you say that, since the preferred term is now “composable architecture” or, in the case of Vercel, simply “frontend platform.” To be fair, these platforms have evolved quite a bit and now offer a more comprehensive set of features beyond supporting the JAM stack.
Netlify stresses that it is acquiring Gatsby, at least in part, for its Valhalla Content Hub, which the company describes as a centralized data layer that helps businesses make their various data sources accessible through a unified GraphQL API. With the content hub, Gatsby shifted its focus away from its general-purpose frontend framework, but with that, it also entered the highly competitive everything-as-a-united-GraphQL-API space where Apollo GraphQL, Kong and others already played.
“The future of the web is composable architectures. The acquisition of Gatsby not only accelerates our product roadmap, but more importantly, allows us to provide developers with increased flexibility and choice in building composable web experiences,” said Biilmann. “We’re excited to integrate Gatsby’s cloud innovations into the Netlify platform, and open up Gatsby’s content hub and source plugin ecosystem to the diverse world of modern frontend frameworks like Astro, Next and Remix.”
GatsbyJS co-founder Kyle Mathews today noted that Netlify plans to invest into the Gatsby framework, while many of the Gatsby Cloud features will be integrated into Netlify and the Valhalla Content Hub will become available as part of the Netlify platform.
“After years of partnering with Netlify, we are thrilled to join forces,” said Zack Urlocker, CEO, Gatsby. “We share a belief in the future of composable architecture, and together, we will better be able to bring our cloud solution to enterprise teams and accelerate the adoption of composable.”
As far as cliché startup acquisition quotes go, that’s about as cliché as it gets, but at least there’s no mention of an incredible journey.
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