Sanity Acquires Begin Team, Aims to Accelerate the Evolution of its Content Operating System

When I spoke to Mathias Billman recently, the word sanity popped up more than once during our conversation. It wasn’t an off-color reference to the chaos of our modern digital ecosystem, but the evocation of a content management tool that frequently rides alongside Netlify – a leading web development platform he co-founded. 

Of course, this is logical. Sanity (I'm referring to the application) offers a number of integrations and connectors for Netlify. But more importantly, Billman is an angel investor in the platform, a clear indicator that he sees Sanity as a transformative resource for composable stacks – where its novel vision as a Content Operating System is proving its value.

To its credit, Sanity has carved out a unique position for itself, focusing on content as structured data and cultivating a tacit developer-centricity. It has also earned its place as a trusted solution for big global players like Figma, Puma, AT&T, and Burger King, further validating its impact as enterprises strive for faster, more composable ways to power their digital experiences at scale. 

The run-up has been solid for Sanity. In 2021, the company closed on a $39 million Series B that heralded its vision for extensible content repositories (and also brought its total raise to nearly $52 million). A year later, they were forging strategic partnerships with the likes of Shopify, nurturing its value across commerce channels. Competition has certainly swelled over the last two years, but Sanity has remained steadfast around its central mission while evolving its messaging. 

As Sanity proclaims, content is the competitive differentiator for brands, and its Sanity Content Operating System is purpose-built to deliver on that proposition. The platform’s composition of composable APIs with a customizable workspace – along with its Content Lake storage and distribution – provides an elegant model that its peers don't offer (at least not in the same construct). 

Given the success of its longtail vision and the christening of its Content Operating System, the company is doubling down on the next phase of its evolution. Last week, Sanity announced that it has onboarded the complete team behind Begin.com – a company specializing in deploying full-stack web apps to AWS. If you’re not familiar, Begin was also responsible for creating popular open source frameworks like Architect (go check it out on Github).

Buying Begin’s mindshare is a strategic move, one that reinforces Sanity’s mission to better enable developers and digital leaders. It also deepens its goal of helping customers rethink how they use content and technology to drive growth, particularly at a time when tech budgets are being heavily scrutized around the value quotient. 

Begin’s CEO, Brian Leroux, seemed bullish about his company’s synthesis with Sanity, and noted in the company’s press release that he sees “a lot of untapped potential in how content can be used.”

Sanity's Content Lake, introduced in 2018, disrupted the content management landscape by providing a central hub for integration across channels and platforms. This ignited some early gains for the platform’s offerings, particularly as composability shifted into high gear. Despite the realization of content automation for many of its customers, the full potential of automation has remained, as Leroux pointed out, relatively untapped. 

With the addition of Begin, Sanity hopes to accelerate its innovation and attain new levels of performance. The Begin team brings deep experience in developing powerful compute and automation capabilities – attributes that will be critical to reducing manual workloads and streamlining content processes. 

I had a chance to talk with Magnus Hillestad, co-founder and CEO of Sanity, about his plans for Begin. It's worth noting that Hillestad is an ex-finance and private equity guy turned tech start-up leader, thus bringing more of the traditional commercial optics to the founder's role. This is a distinct advantage for the company, one that undoubtedly contributed to its successful capital raising. 

Aside from the foundational benefits of force multiplying Sanity’s innovation resources, it’s clear that a central impact for customers is greater resiliency and agility in the face of widespread technological change.

"The Begin team joining us marks a transformative moment for Sanity and for what our customers can expect going forward," he said. “By combining their expertise in compute and modern app deployments with our vision for an automated, resilient content operating system, we're redefining what's possible in content management. This powerful synergy will unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency and innovation for our customers, propelling industries like e-commerce, media and technology into a new era of content operations.”

Where to Begin? With an automation end game

Sanity has been challenging the status quo of content management since coming online in 2018. Sanity’s core philosophy – reflected in its Content Operating System platform – flips the standard CMS narrative by treating content as data, and by connecting and automating systems beyond its central hub. This shift in perception also allows teams to treat content as a more strategic asset for their business.

From a developer perspective, the addition of Begin’s resources will provide a number of benefits. This includes the addition of powerful compute resources, giving users the ability to scale extensible content distribution systems with embedded automation.

Begin’s heritage as an AWS development house was certainly a key part of the acquisition appeal. By absorbing a cohort of expertise with proven success deploying web apps to the world’s leading cloud, Sanity hoped to imbue its features with next-level scalability – all while mitigating the headaches associated with deploying apps on Sanity.  

“The Begin Team's experience building within a 'cloud hyperscaler' environment provides substantial value to our customers through the development of powerful compute capabilities,” he said, “which simplifies the way they build complex content automations. The goal is to enable our customers to easily deploy content operations applications directly on the Sanity Content Operating System, abstracting away much of the complexity.”

Hillestad went on to explain that many of Sanity’s customers are setting up content operations applications in their own cloud environments. Given this vector, he believes Sanity can provide a better developer experience by offering an abstracted compute layer, giving customers the option to leverage Sanity for their automation and content ops needs while still allowing direct cloud integrations where needed.

“Ultimately, by leveraging the Begin team's capabilities, we aim to empower the same developers who have become superstars at building content workflows in Sanity Studio to also excel at deploying content operations and automation on our platform,” he said. 

Another stated focus for the Begin team will be the delivery of content infrastructure as code. This will manifest in more powerful tools that help users develop, deploy, and manage advanced content pipelines with greater ease and efficacy.  

What about content marketers?

As previously noted, Sanity has carved out a reputation for being “developer-friendly.” That might translate to “requires code” for the gaggle of CMS users hungry for less cumbersome, more drag-and-drop-oriented solutions with composable propensities. 

Many of the now “legacy” headless CMS tools are endeavoring to differentiate their value through visual editing tools. Sanity is already addressing this side of content ops ledger with Sanity Studio, which enables a host of visual features like customizable components and block content editing, as well as collaboration and workspace capabilities. On the automation front, it even sports things like intelligent image cropping and scaling.

A mockup of collaboration features in Sanity Studio

At the same time, the company maintains a clear pipeline back to the developers with Sanity Studio, allowing users to connect a production-ready content backend to an application. Studio’s customization framework allows for the development of unique content forms, workflows, validation, workspaces, and more – all built using modern web dev patterns that make the journey easier and more efficient.

"The real win is in enabling tighter collaboration between developers and the rest of the content organization to deliver better digital experiences.”

I wanted to know how Sanity’s investment in Begin would translate into greater value for the broader content operations model – vis-à-vis the marketers and editors driving the content itself. The amplification of compute resources and cloud dimensions are more the domain of DevOps; aside from impacting speed and productivity for editors, what other gains might be on the horizon?

As Hillestad pointed out, the acquisition of Begin will take Sanity’s developer offerings to the next level, but the organizational benefits will be very tangible for non-developers as well.

“While it's true that Sanity has always put a strong emphasis on being developer-friendly, the benefits of this approach extend far beyond the developer experience,” Hillestad said. “We believe that the most advanced organizations empower their skilled engineers to enable efficient, scalable content operations that drive impactful storytelling.”

How will they deliver on this? By enabling content operations within the same system, thus reducing context switching between tools. As Hillestad explained, content strategists and product managers will have an easier path to integrating all related content and data directly into their single source of truth – enabling that richer storytelling potential.

“So while speed and productivity gains are certainly part of the equation, the real win is in enabling tighter collaboration between developers and the rest of the content organization to deliver better digital experiences.”

What about AI?

While the acquisition of Begin is a big deal for Sanity, there’s been significant AI investment from all corners of the CMS landscape. Given its ambitions to evolve the Content Operating System to new levels of performance, I asked Hillestad how is AI playing into his plans – and if Begin’s proximity to AWS and its Amazon Bedrock or Anthropic services might be an advantage. 

“AI is indeed a significant part of our plans going forward, and the Begin team will play a key role in making AI capabilities more accessible to developers on our platform,” he said. “Sanity already offers several AI-powered tools for our users, leveraging services like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Pinecone. With the addition of the Begin team, we will make it even easier for developers to build their own custom AI functions and workflows on top of our platform.”

As Sanity further develops its AI offerings, Hillestad forecast that it plans to support a wide range of AI services and large language models to give its customers maximum flexibility. 

“The Begin team's expertise in building developer abstractions will be invaluable as we work to make these powerful AI capabilities more approachable and integrated into the Sanity ecosystem.”

Why it matters

In a marketplace of increasingly commoditized headless offerings, Sanity continues to establish differentiated value with its niche position as a Content Operating System. As it onboards the experience and resources of Begin, it is further investing in a growth angle that will enhance automation, scalability, and performance – perhaps in profound ways. 

Still, Sanity’s greatest strength could be its main detractor. Developer reliance is part of the resistance for marketing organizations when adopting new tools, and decisions are being driven by composable technologies that now offer a complete range of features that enable editor independence. This is where a developer-centric perception can be a limiting factor. 

That said, Sanity is effectively bridging the gap. Sanity Studio is the best example of its unification potential, and already provides robust capabilities that stand apart from a UX perspective. While Begin’s cloud and compute resources will inject more integrative fabric into the platform, it would be smart to see equal attention paid to further enhancing the editor experience.

Partnering with Netlify and other development platforms is also a key benefit in Sanity’s favor. By expanding its connector libraries and reducing the barriers to entry, it can accelerate content velocity for users and brands as part of a go-to composable stack. Relying on these channels will be key to enhancing visibility and preference. 

Of course, choice is the biggest challenge for every player on the CMS chessboard. But Sanity has managed to build a solid foundation of differentiation, one that could serve it well as it looks to grow. 

Adding these new resources is a great way to begin its next chapter. 

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