Storyblok is writing its next chapter with an $80M Series C. Here’s why it matters

There are 80 million reasons why Dominik Angerer is excited.

Let’s start with the first one: Storyblok is on a roll.

It’s true. The headless CMS – now shifting to a simple yet elegant position as a “modern content management system” – has built an impressive cohort of over 200,000 happy developers and marketers around the globe.  

How happy, you ask? As Dominik shared in our recent conversation, the word “churn” is not part of his vocabulary. 

“I’ve never had a customer leave because of our product,” he beamed with pride. 

Could that be true? 

I’d bet on it. Because they actually do have a great product, armed with a phenomenal UX that really understands its users. Every demo I’ve conducted has been impressive. And while there’s always room for improvement, that’s exactly what Dominik, who has the ferocious heart of a developer, seems to love about this game: making his product better.   

Another of these aforementioned 80 million reasons? Investors seem to dig where Storyblok is headed, and they’re showing up with piles of cash and reams of confidence. Today, the company announced that it closed on its Series C to the tune of $80 million, bringing its total raise to a chunky $138 million. 

It’s worth noting that Brighton Park Capital, a Connecticut-based growth equity firm, led the round (existing investors HV Capital, Mubadala Capital, 3VC, and firstminute capital were also part of the club). This is Storyblok’s first U.S. investor, reflecting the company’s ambitions to grow its North American footprint.

Getting to Series C was a nine-month haul, but according to Dominik, Brighton Park made the juice worth the squeeze.

“They’re an amazing partner, and they actually understand our product,” he said. “They really care about it. They wanted to know the differentiators and why [customers are] sticking with Storyblok for so long. It's just great to find partners that really support the development that we have planned.”

Even with a kick-butt investment partner by its side, the road ahead won’t be easy. There are headwinds a-plenty, from shaky economic conditions to “contentious” elections on both sides of the Atlantic – not to mention social and humanitarian challenges in every direction.  

Oh, and there’s that little thing called competition, mired in the confusion of a market that can’t quite decide what it means to be “headless” or “composable” (feel free to debate amongst yourselves).

But if Storyblok has proven anything, it’s resilient, and that’s best illustrated by a cabal of top-tier customers that trust its CMS across industries. This includes brands like Adidas, T-Mobile, Renault, and Oatly, to name a few. 

The Series C will certainly help the company capitalize its resources to accelerate growth and scale beyond its 240 remote personnel, particularly in the U.S. – where Dominik said the company has already established a beachhead by incorporating Storyblok in Delaware and making several key hires.

While the investment news is big, there’s a roadmap that feels even bigger. I had a chance to chat with Dominik about the company’s vision for building what it calls the first "end-to-end content platform.” There’s some AI and automation mixed in (as you might imagine these days), but the real goal is to create a truly connected and collaborative content experience – something that’s been elusive in the CMS world since the Paleolithic Era. 

I realize there are still a few million reasons for Dominik to be riding high at this moment. We won’t get to all of them, but I do have one big observation that boiled out of our conversation. I’ll save that for the end of the story.

Evolving CMS beyond a content repository

In his recent article, Untangling the CMS market in 2024, my fellow critic Janus Boye channeled some “straight talk” about the current state of content management systems. As he astutely observed, few organizations are using a CMS to actually manage content – and more (although far from all) are using it just to store content.

It seems antithetical to the purpose and the acronym. Of course, this industry is ripe with that kind of confusion – even about its core value. Conquering this confusion is key to Storyblok's strategy, and Dominik crystallized this in an evolutionary construct. In his mind, it’s all about moving past the product being just a content repository and reinventing it as a place where your content lives. 

“You start with an idea, then you create and distribute [your content] to other channels,” he described. “But 12 months after you launch your new landing pages and everything has been sorted, you realize ‘okay, we'll need to adapt our messaging again.’ Now we have to redo all of this content to add new messaging or adjust for voice or tone. And this kind of maintenance is something nobody wants to do – and nobody does it.”

“A CMS can’t just be a place where your content is sent to die."

He's right: content becomes old and stale. As a blog writer and analyst, I know first-hand just how moldy an article can get. And that’s where he sees the opportunity to refresh and revitalize, automate facets of updating content, and evolve away from being just a repository. 

“A CMS can’t just be a place where your content is sent to die,” he mused. A bit macabre, sure. But spot on. 

To avoid the burial stones of this content graveyard, Storyblok is focusing on a pure path, one that will keep it directly focused on CMS. This distinction is important for Dominik, specifically as he weighs the challenges and consequences of conflating their offering to the market. 

“We will become an end-to-end platform, but the one thing I can promise you: we will not spin out into e-commerce, search, or other products,” he maintained emphatically.  “That's usually the pathway, but that's not what we're going to do. That's not what I believe is the smartest thing for CMS.”

Targeting global growth with a focus on the U.S.

As previously mentioned, Storyblok – which is headquartered in Austria – is looking across the pond to mine new opportunities. Powered by its funding windfall, the expansion into the U.S. market has already been swift, and Dominik has some aggressive growth targets.

“The next move is to ramp up the 20% of revenue that we have right now coming from the U.S. to 50% of our total revenue in the next two and a half years,” he said. “And I'm really looking forward to it, because we’re expecting European growth as well.”

From an industry perspective, the U.S. certainly holds some rich possibilities. Not only is the addressable market much larger, but according to Dominik, prospects are coming to Storyblok from a range of verticals – and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 

“The customers we're talking to in different industries include manufacturing, finance, banking, insurance, government, and they’re all really liking Storyblok,” he said. “They’re really enjoying it so far, and we can use those case studies now to really flip it over to new ones that have similar issues and challenges with CMS as well.”

In terms of a go-to-market strategy, I’ve spoken to many CMS vendors this year, and the lion’s share of European outfits have been eyeing the U.S. market with hungry eyes. This could make the race a little tighter, but this is where marketing comes in – and having ample investment dollars to jazz up lead gen programs is a great place to be.

Wait… what about that “headless” thing? 

With so much confusion surrounding the headless CMS category, I wanted to know how Storyblok is wrestling with its own position in the headless market. 

I asked Dominik about his impressions relative to other vendors (I might have mentioned a few positioning lines) and what the future looks like in a world where every platform has an API – and everyone claims to be cut from this hallowed cloth. 

“In the beginning, we looked at headless CMS as an amazing market for us,” he explained. “Everybody understood that it was about APIs and data. It was only Contentful and Contentstack and a few others at the time, we’re talking 2016, and since then, everybody – it doesn't matter if it's WordPress or Joomla or Sitecore – they’re all calling themselves headless or at least have headless capabilities. But now we’ve realized that it's not about headless; that's the technology part. It’s similar to any kind of technology advancement. Call it decoupled, or headless, or composer, or API first. [There are] dozens of names. Some are correct, and some are misused. In the end, it comes down to the content problem at the customer [level].”

That problem has been endemic for quite some time, and as Dominik clarified, the confusion often stems from how platforms are marketing themselves – and not always tuning into the needs of the customer. To his point, they’re often looking for a pure CMS to solve their content problem, and not expansive platforms packed with solutions they simply won’t use (the classic “overbuying” argument). This further codified some deeper discussions we’ve had at previous CMS conferences, specifically around platforms being clear about what they are – and what they aren’t. 

“We are a CMS, and we should be proud of it. It's boring, yes. But boring means stable. Boring means good. Boring means fast and secure. And to be honest, I love that way more.”

Now, we see that playing out in the headless CMS category, which brings us full circle to the same questions that have puzzled us from the beginning: was it ever really a type of CMS, or simply a feature of a CMS with an API? There are certainly UX attributes of a headless CMS that make it distinct, but many of those are washing away in the race to the middle. 

So, how much functionality will be added to these “legacy” headless platforms? How will we distinguish them, and what does this mean for the category at large? Will these platforms be recognizable as anything other than a pure CMS? What does it mean for DXPs that are using the term to position their offerings? And will Storyblok continue to follow the same trajectory as others have?

There are still many unanswered questions, but Dominik is focused on cutting through the chaos. And despite the challenges of maneuvering through the morass, he has a pretty solid perspective.

“To be honest, I'm still struggling internally to make it clear that we will not become a big content suite or content as a service,” he said. “We are a CMS, and we should be proud of it. It's boring, yes. But boring means stable. Boring means good. Boring means fast and secure. And to be honest, I love that way more.”

Ideation Room: The first step to an end-to-end content platform

Along with fueling its growth in the U.S. and Europe, Storyblok will also leverage its Series C funding to realize its vision for building an end-to-end content platform, enhanced by AI and automation.

As a first step towards fulfilling that vision, the company just announced the public beta of its new Ideation Room, a dynamic environment where content creators can collaborate on ideas with colleagues in real-time before transforming them into digital content and preparing for publication. 

I asked Dominik why the Ideation Room is such an important part of Storyblok’s strategy and how AI is contributing to its value. As it turns out, the whole idea was ignited by very practical observations about how content is created and what its real value represents to users. 

“For the last couple of months after our ‘State of CMS’ report, we talked with all of our customers and asked them, ‘What is the number one thing that you're struggling with right now in Storyblok or any other solution?’ And the crazy thing is, about 80% of them said, ‘Hey, we would love to not have any copy-and-paste issues from a Word document or Google Docs, because there are different formatting issues when you copy into rich text fields. So we went ahead and added a button that removes the formatting, and everything was fine, right? But then we realized, they're still writing content in Google Docs and Word. That means our product is not inviting them to create within it.”

Dominik then talked to other non-Storyblok CMS users, many of whom were not writing in the CMS. “I get it,” he said. “It's your source of truth. You don't want to dilute it with unfinished content, and that makes sense. What we realized is that there needs to be a space within your CMS that’s purely about unstructured content. Something that’s already part of the CMS where you can create ideas and enforce certain content entries for certain components that you're currently discussing.”

That led to the development of a private PoC, which, according to Dominik, the test pilots fell in love with. During the course of the experiment, some of the users asked about adding AI to help accelerate and enhance content creation.  

“We're not an AI company,” Dominik reinforced. “But [our customers] wanted to generate content and images, and that was a good idea. So we integrated it, and that led to an OpenAI option.”

Storyblok's Ideation Room dashboard

Storyblok’s Ideation Room is precisely what it sounds like: a space for ideas. From a visual UX perspective, it’s intuitive and lightweight, providing an “open canvas” for creators to post their ideas and format everything using simple WYSIWYG tools. You can move your ideas into Stories, brainstorm with colleagues, add links to other ideas, leave comments in your text, and even manage relevant resources (external sites, documents, etc.) in one place. You can then preview your ideas in a Visual Editor.

Storyblok's Ideation Room docs draft view with formatting tools

Ideation Room's built-in AI features are easy to activate and designed to enhance and facilitate content creation. Throughout the experience, users will be able to prompt AI to generate or transform text as needed. Dominik also indicated that the Ideation Room beta will not require a user’s personal or business tokens to access any of the current AI features. 

“We’re covering that cost during the beta because we want to understand how customers are using it,” he said, further explaining that this will likely evolve into a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on a user’s LLM tokens – although much of that is still in the works. 

As far as broader pricing is concerned, the product is still in its early days, so more R&D is expected before rolling out a GA. But it’s an important step in making Storyblok a more attractive environment for creating content, managing it throughout its entire lifecycle, and realizing an end-to-end vision for its platform’s value. 

Why it matters

I’ve written before about this conundrum of content creation in a CMS. Mark Demeny and I discussed it in a previous interview, professing how we both continue to make words in Word or collaborate with a gaggle in Google. Everyone makes content in different places, but almost never in their CMS. 

Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons. Some relate to personal preference, others to workflows or compliance requirements (maybe you have to send a Word doc to the SEC for approval). But there's a bevy of other relevant questions that might surface: How does my CMS save session data? Where would my unstructured files be stored? Does it function just like Word or Google Docs? Is it reliable? How can I share my files outside the CMS? And why replicate systems that already work? 

As Dominik noted, their research affirms the continued reliance on outside systems. While other CMSes have certainly improved their editing experience – and maybe a few have moved the needle on improving the creation experience – no one has reached the promised land. 

Of course, the most compelling reason to create in a CMS is clear: it would simplify everything, better unify teams, and enhance collaboration within a single source of truth. There will still be diehards, but if Storyblok can pull it off, they might be igniting the next wave of product innovation within CMS platforms as we chase more robust content creation experiences.

Ideation Room is a great first step towards realizing this vision, and Dominik’s zeal for the project is undeniable. Still, there’s something we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation that had a strong impact on my perception of where Storyblok “fits” in this expanding market of choices. 

This year, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with the top brass at numerous industry-leading CMSes, mid-market vendors, and start-ups. As competition becomes denser, marketing messages have become more expansive and, in some cases, abstract. Making those messages sticky and meaningful is hard, especially as we see fewer vendors leading with “headless.”

What I found refreshing is how Dominik reinforced the pure CMS as the most important focus for Storyblok. By simply defining themselves as a “modern content management system,” they are doubling down on simplicity. To his point, it might be “boring,” but it’s stable, secure, highly performant, and it makes customers happy. 

Of course, there's always a perceived danger in being too vanilla (that's my inner marketer talking). Many platforms have made the mistake of choosing pizazz over pragmatism, and it's had mixed results. Maybe it's a good reminder that the job of the CMS is to help creators make their own content and experiences exciting – and that's where “boring” and “stable” really translate. 

And yes, telling the market what you are is key. But it’s also important to be frank about what you aren’t and to focus on where you can really deliver value. 

As Storyblok rallies with its Series C infusion, it will face significant competition, particularly at the enterprise level. But Dominik’s sheer positivity, unmatched vigor, and clear vision might be the strongest arrows in its quiver. Even as we discussed some of the existential threats facing the market – including AI-generated misinformation – he was tacitly upbeat about his company’s role in being part of the solution.  

“It's a catch-up game,” he reflected. “But I mean, we're in for that rollercoaster. And I'm happy to be part of it, so we can at least steer the wheel to a certain degree and see what we can fix.”

It certainly is a rollercoaster. That's why you need great leadership to shape the story. 

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