Builder.io nets $20M from Microsoft's venture fund. What it means for the future of headless CMS

“If you build it, they will come…”

Maybe the team at Builder.io was channeling that phrase as they forged their roadmap for innovation. It’s clearly working.

And if the apotheosis isn’t self-evident, “they” refers to the almighty Microsoft.

Pedagogy aside, “they” just delivered a Field of Dreams to the AI-powered “visual headless CMS” to the tune of $20 million. The injection is courtesy of Microsoft’s M12 Venture Fund, a well-respected brand in the hallowed halls of tech-vesting.

According to the company’s website, the funds will help the company expand its global team, accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and provide resources to support its extensive organic demand. 

I’m sure Kevin Costner (star of the aforementioned Field of Dreams and restless cowpoke) would agree this is a home run. But it’s also a signal of what’s stirring in those golden headless cornfields, particularly as vendors add more visual building, editing, and preview features to enhance their offerings.

As a tool, Builder.io accelerates the production of digital experiences, allowing users to free up developer capacity to focus on other higher-level tasks, like developing algorithms that predict the curve on a spitball. 

A big part of its winning play: an AI pitch with some real fire. This is where Microsoft could stack the bench with innovation – and another reason why Steve Sewell, Builder.io’s CEO and co-founder, sounds bullish about the match. 

“Having the confidence and backing from such an innovative leader in tech – and more recently, the artificial intelligence revolution – further validates our mission,” he noted in a blog about the news. He went on to explain how his company is pushing the boundaries of AI to create visual development solutions that optimize workflows and empower anyone to be part of the building process. 

It’s true that visual development of this ilk is still relatively new. The UX similarities to Webflow aside, the new breed of composable builders were born out of the broken editing experiences that headless left in its wake. In the race to make things faster and better, developers felt the headless heat while marketers were left in the cold, dreaming of drag-and-drop features as they opened laborious IT tickets to add things like basic buttons to a page.

I’ve been talking to a lot of headless vendors since the start of 2024, and most are on the journey towards “healing” this rift, regardless of their audience or market focus. Obviously, Builder.io has its own niche, but even more pure-play headless vendors are adding editing and preview features. 

It wasn’t so long ago that a headless CMS didn’t sport any of these attributes. Now, it’s starting to look like a requirement to compete – and a must-have for users evaluating tools.  

Are we seeing an evolution of the “headless CMS” category? If so, what will buyers expect in this new landscape, and how do vendors avoid creating even more confusion? 

In the case of Builder.io, the answer seems to lie in the pursuit of value. Their growth and investment opportunities are being driven (in part) by a hunger for greater freedom and control, and platforms that understand where they truly deliver their greatest value will be loading the bases.

Building on success

Launched in 2019, Builder.io has been firing line drives up the middle of the market, delivering continued year-over-year growth. This latest round follows an infusion of $14 million from Greylock and a cohort of investors in 2021 – that’s akin to a respectable ERA for any player in the league.  

A bit of backstory: the journey to Builder.io started with Sewell and co-founder Brent Locks while working together at ShopStyle, an e-commerce fashion company. The duo embraced headless architectures to power web apps and streamline their development, which was great for them, but not so much for marketers who wanted to update pages and run tests.

With code standing in the way of testing and development, retailers (in particular) got resourceful, drawing on their survival instincts to solve problems. This resulted in the use of third-party tools that dragged down performance and governance. 

With Builder.io, business teams get everything they want in a page builder, from managing the right web flow to a rich drag-and-drop visual editor for building and editing. At the same time, developers get the benefits of a headless CMS that’s API-driven and tech-agnostic, so it works with any tech stack – from Angular to React. You can also connect with any data source, including commerce platforms like Shopify, CDPs, legacy homegrown systems, or even another CMS.

As we’ve heard from other visual-focused platforms like Uniform (once champions of the now less-amplified “Digital Experience Composition” cabal), development and code are often the bottlenecks for many customers, specifically those in commerce. Builder.io promises that marketers, product managers, or designers can use existing components – or create their own – to build out content, run A/B tests, and measure conversions.

An ecosystem of freedom and control

One of the things I’ve always liked about Builder.io is its focus on simplicity. The UI is incredibly intuitive, with navigation access to a range of features and resources. This includes a myriad of design tools as well as A/B testing, versions, history, and more.

With its Builder Visual CMS, you have a component-based block system that enables almost anyone – literally – to create experiences in a snap. Users have full control over exactly what a team can drag and drop to create bespoke designs or pages that are conformant with existing design systems. 

Everything is built around responsiveness at its core, with the ability to add custom animations and theme assets that fit with your brand. Anything you build can also be saved as a template.

There are a host of collaboration tools, including granular roles and permissions and real-time “multiplayer” editing that avoids conflicts when more than one user is making changes (that one is super handy for teams). You can also track and roll back to previous iterations. 

I think the optimization features really stand out. Builder.io weaves in both multivariate testing and analytics, so you have the complete lifecycle for managing your A/B testing initiatives. Even cooler: they offer heat maps to help reveal key insights about user engagement.

From Figma to functional code with Visual Copilot

Design-to-code workflows are notoriously slow, impeding go-to-market strategies for enterprises and digital retailers. With the rise of design tools like Figma and UXPin, the process has accelerated to be sure (in the case of UXPin’s Merge, there’s even a design library that syncs with React components in Git). But it’s still mired in that complex step of turning visual ideas into functioning web and mobile experiences. 

There are a few platforms out there that are doing yeoman’s work to streamline the journey from prototype to product. I’ve seen some great demos for platforms like Kajoo AI that export Figma designs to Jamstack code – including HTML, CSS, React, NextJS, Vue, and Angular.

The Figma translation is also a big part of Builder.io’s focus. With its AI-powered Visual Copilot, you can move designs into clean, reusable code in 80% less time with a single click. 

You read that right: one click. 

Visual Copilot really bridges the gulf betwixt developers and marketers, allowing anyone to utilize a simple plugin to convert their Figma designs to semantic code that’s automatically responsive. Components in Figma can then be synced with Visual Copilot for use in the future. 

The AI code editor is a massive timesaver and eliminates a ton of complexity, but developers can work in Builder.io to directly refine the code as needed – so there are no compromises on control and output.

Next up on the roadmap? Builder.io is already thinking about new features like instant component set generation, and even a prompt-to-design solution for creating high-fidelity Figma designs that utilize your existing design system. This is now blending into the domain of products like Dorik, where AI is being used to create fully functional experiences with nothing more than a field and a few words.                                                                                                               

Why it matters

A quick note on Field of Dreams: if you’re not familiar with the classic 1989 film, it’s a peculiar mashup of existential fantasy, theology, faith, and family – all draped in the Great American Pastime.

Said another way, it’s about baseball… and what lies beyond.

This movie is a great tableau for how Builder.io is transforming the space, specifically with its focus on AI. For those of us who remember building websites with nothing but Dreamweaver, we pined for a magical solution that converted visual designs into working code. Seeing it finally materialize is, in a word, dreamy. 

I encourage you to try it for yourself; it’s quite stunning to see how seamlessly the Figma processing occurs. Obviously, the more complex a design, the more tweaking that might be involved. But overall, it’s pretty darn polished – and a quick read of the comments on the Figma plugin page validates that fans are cheering. 

We could spend a lot of time discussing the visual builder's numerous benefits, which are impressive in themselves. And yes, this is a novel approach to creating digital experiences, but it’s also content management – and Builder.io positioning its platform as a “visual headless CMS” is indicative of the change we’re seeing across the category. 

When Kontent.ai relaunched its brand last week, the company’s leaders were quick to point out that the definition of a headless CMS was being challenged by all sides of the market, with traditional and composable DXPs muddying the waters (hence why they’re calling this a “new era of content management”).

The shift is real – and with so many platforms bringing their own visual building, editing, or preview features online, buyers are likely to expect or demand these capabilities. Even open source headless CMSes like Strapi are introducing their own visual tools in an effort to maintain parity and improve the editing experience. There’s also the rest of the stack to consider, and like its peers, Builder.io is bringing asset management and other “DXP Lite” features to the table.

Still, as Builder.io touts, it’s part of a composable play: use the frameworks you want, integrate with a range of third-party apps, bring in existing data and personalization tools. Heck, you can even use a different headless CMS. Choice – and the ease of making said choices – is key to composability.

If you’re feeling confused about categories, you’re not alone. Along with Builder.io’s visual headless CMS, we have advanced headless CMSes, composable DXPs and content platforms, and other permutations among the dense field of competitors. A great example is Sanity, which positions itself as a Composable Content Cloud while reinforcing that it’s a “headless CMS and so much more.” 

Much to the chagrin of headless CMS vendors, traditional DXPs are also offering a headless CMS as part of their product ecosystem (or positioning their web API as a kind of headless expression), capitalizing on the surge around omnichannel messaging.  

And herein lies the problem: how do buyers find what they’re looking for? 

The answer: they have to do more work.

To help ease that burden, a headless CMS needs to be focused on establishing its value with clarity. I think Builder.io has a distinct advantage with its focus on the visual web layer, but it’s still leaning hard on the benefits of being headless. Nonetheless, M12 sees how that glimmering patina of value can translate into future subscriptions, particularly with users that want simple, drag-and-drop solutions – so this is where the dollars are drifting. 

Making your value meaningful to the market is the key. While pure headless platforms might still have their place, the expanded surface area of features is amplifying the value message. As buyers shop around, many will select tools based on the presence of these features – even if they’re planning an ultra-composable approach to their stack. 

With so much confusion on all sides, it’s hard to say where “headless” will end up as a distinct category. In the beginning, many argued that it was just a feature of composed content management systems (oh, the irony). Some players even attempted to distance themselves from the moniker. But that’s proven challenging given its weight within the industry lexicon, particularly relative to SEO. 

As such, it’s still here. Even if the path to home plate is a bit uneven. 

But who knows? Maybe we’ll just start calling it “CMS” again. 

Wouldn’t that be dreamy.  

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