Why we couldn't resist raising from eBay - our Series A announcement - WunderGraph

State of GraphQL Federation 2026

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We raised a $7.5M Series A led by Karma Ventures, with eBay Ventures joining as a key strategic investor alongside Aspenwood Ventures and a group of angel investors.

Burn multiple

The ratio between ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) added in a year and the amount of money burned in the same period is called the burn multiple. E.g., a burn multiple of 0.14 means that a company burns $140k for every $1M ARR added in a year. A low burn multiple means that a company is very efficient in terms of revenue generation.

How our bet on building an Open-Source GraphQL Federation Platform paid off after just 1 year

It was summer 2023, and WunderGraph was not doing well. The "Backend For Frontend" Framework we built was not gaining the traction we had hoped for. The whole team was together on a retreat in an old sheep farm in the Netherlands, realizing that we had to pivot.

The decision was made to build a new product, a fully open-source Platform for GraphQL Federation, and that's how Cosmo was born. Two months later, we onboarded our first customer, but before Cosmo took off, we had to go through the darkest days in our company's history.

How a single conference made all the difference

Cosmo was barely working, and we were running out of money. Our last hope was the GraphQL Conf in San Francisco, where we presented Cosmo for the first time to the public.

One memory that sticks with us from that trip is when we met two amazing gentlemen in their golden years at Benihana. We were lucky to share a table with Ale and Bill and couldn't resist asking them for a picture. Two brothers, both in their 90s, living their best lives while traveling the world. This evening made us realize that there's more to life than just building a startup; the relationships we build along the way make it all worth it.

The WunderGraph Founders with Ale and Bill at Benihana

A race against time

After the conference, we quickly needed to ramp up our sales efforts. However, initial enthusiasm quickly turned into disappointment when we realized that the initial interest was not translating into actual customers.

One of the critical parts of Cosmo is the Query Planner, which is responsible for generating a query plan to load the data from the underlying APIs. It was tricky to get this part right, as Federation has lots of edge cases, including some that are not even known to the creators. Luckily, our sales cycles were long enough that we could land more customers, just in time.

A silver lining out of nowhere, the miracle is happening

It was early March 2024, and we got a notification in our #general channel in Slack about a new customer that had signed up for Cosmo. Our self signup plan is just $500/month, but every customer counts.

We reached out to them, and shortly thereafter they joined a private channel on our Discord server. What started as a lengthy conversation about the capabilities of Cosmo quickly turned into a discussion about our vision for the future of GraphQL. Eventually, we met via Zoom and it became clear that our values matched.

The path to profitability

What followed after March was absolute madness. We were suddenly overwhelmed with demand and had to onboard new customers. Among them were big names like On The Beach, SoundCloud, EOG Resources, INNIO, and many more.

Towards the end of 2024, we suddenly woke up to the fact that we were profitable. It was time to think about the future and how we were going to scale.

eBay & WunderGraph - from customer to strategic partner

Fast forward to early 2025, the founders of WunderGraph had to make a difficult decision. Are we going to keep bootstrapping or raise a Series A? Fortunately, eBay gave us a little push in the right direction.

Together, we're aiming to build the Enterprise standard for GraphQL Federation.

Cosmo wouldn't exist without these people

Shortly after our retreat in the Netherlands, we were approached by Tailor Inc., a YC backed startup that builds a headless ERP system. Their commitment was a key factor to not just fund a part of the development of the engine, but also help us with use cases and feedback to drive the project forward. We would also like to thank Jack Chuka (Head of Platform), our main point of contact at Tailor.

The second story is about Sven and Fredrik from Soundtrack Your Brand. Having access to their schemas, queries, and use cases was a game changer for us.

The WunderGraph Founders with the Soundtrack Your Brand Platform Team

Bringing good Karma to WunderGraph

Aside from partnering with a publicly traded company, we're excited to welcome Tommi Uhari, Partner at Karma Ventures, to our board of directors, representing our new lead investor.

The team behind WunderGraph

We're extremely proud of what our team of just under 20 people has achieved in the last 12 months, but our journey is really just at the beginning. We've got exciting plans for the future, and we're looking for more people to join us.

The WunderGraph Team (partial)

The future of WunderGraph and GraphQL Federation

We've figured out how to make GraphQL Federation work for small startups and big companies like eBay. On the product side, it's long overdue to build a better version of Federation.

What's next? - Time to join the Federation rocket ship!

We're looking to expand our team on the sales, marketing, and engineering side. If you're passionate about Golang, APIs, and Open Source, you're a perfect fit to help us build the future of GraphQL Federation.

Why we're doing what we're doing

At the heart of WunderGraph is the belief that every digital business runs on top of APIs. Our goal is to help organizations unify all their APIs into one place, making it easy to discover APIs for their use cases and collaborate on creating new APIs for future products.