Why the age of CMS is over and why we raised $85M Series C

I remember when Simen, Even, Øyvind, and I had our first founder summit at a budget hotel in San Rafael, outside San Francisco. We went on long hikes along the Pacific, discussing the future of content, how CMSes have failed, and how we were on a mission to change that.

Today, we launch the first complete version of this vision—the Content Operating System—and announce our $85M Series C funding round, which will enable us to complete our vision.

The broken promise of a CMS

Sanity was born out of the idea that Content experiences should be exceptional and that content should be a strategic asset for your business. Sanity was never intended to be just a headless CMS or a DXP. Sanity was built as a content-first database, and the Studio as its interface. It was designed to deliver a great developer experience and support flexible content workflows for authors and editors. We knew this would enable businesses to strategically make content at the center of the business—reusable content, where machines and people do their best work.

CMSes worked well for a while but were inherently built as marketing tools, news publishing platforms, or documentation solutions. Each is tailored to a single use case. They were designed for point-and-click configuration, with the goal of avoiding the need to shape the underlying structure around your business.

CMSes are one-size-fits-no-one workflows over customizability and a template-your-WYSIWYG-website-point-and-click instead of scalable programmatic design.

Innovative companies with technical expertise know this doesn't put content at the core of their business. They have built their own system to create, store, and manage their content across applications. Building a CMS that fits your business today is hard enough. Building a system that can adapt and let you iterate as your business grows, changes, divests, acquires, and makes new products and offerings is a whole different ballgame. Some tried with terrible results and swore never to hire a developer to build out a CMS again. Many then went back to buy a CMS (or a DXP, which is really just a CMS with more bells and whistles).

The off-the-shelf CMS worked okay for a (short?) while, if at all, when the CMS was newly configured and the content was fresh. But this didn't last. The excitement of new workflows quickly turned to pain and frustration. It was still a marketing-centric application that treated content as a design concern and relied on point-and-click configuration with one-size-fits-no-one workflows. For those who tried, it quickly showed that time painted you into a corner.

We recently asked our community on Twitter, "Why aren't people more angry with their CMS?" The best answer was that anger is only the second stage of grief, and most organizations have moved on to stage 4—depression or stage 5—acceptance.

Organizations have stopped expecting better solutions. They have settled with the fact that CMSes are terrible and rather try to avoid them as much as possible. It's time people get passionate again––that people start expecting more from their content systems.

The world has changed.
Time to level up your game.

There has never been a better time to level up your content game.

Businesses are turning multi-modal. The best businesses have already started that transformation. E-commerce businesses need to think about storytelling like media companies do, and media companies are adding commerce capabilities to engage their communities. They're even creating events as they look for new opportunities to create value for their users. Old-world physical goods and services companies are adding digital products and services to their business as customer expectations are shifting. The world has changed in front of our eyes.

Legacy systems are holding businesses back. Today's innovative companies simply can't deliver supreme customer experiences or go to market fast with outdated content systems.

The ability to grow is directly tied to how effectively you can use data and efficient processes to create new products and experiences. Business leaders need a clear strategy and the right technical competencies to execute. As your innovation increasingly depends on implementing automation, workflows, and better customer experiences, you need teams that can deliver on your promise.

AI is changing the game by making developers more efficient and capable of building complex solutions––even making code the new no-code for less technical people. But AI isn't a silver bullet; it still requires strong internal competencies at the intersection of technology and business development.

Welcome to the era of
"The Content Operating System"

This new approach reinvents how you think about content across all your company applications. Our platform is not a marketing application or a point solution.

It's an engineering platform built on the principle that Content is Data, and data can shape how your business operates at scale.

Instead of hiding technical affordances, this system seeks to expose the right developer affordances and makes them easy to use. It makes complicated things easy to execute fast, so your business doesn't die trying to innovate.

Our platform makes your web developers capable of shaping their own Content Operations, not only their marketing CMS, but their media process, their Product Information Database, their video applications, their IoT applications, their Learning Management System, and so forth. The central database enables you to unify your content and data in one platform, allowing you to leverage content across all teams and surfaces.

Unlike traditional point-use case systems, the Content Operating System has a unified interface where each team will have its own workflows and applications––where it is easy to synchronize content, integrate workflows, and automate tasks between systems, teams, and applications. Say goodbye to silos and content chaos - guess that sounds familiar?

We couldn't be more excited about this point in time, like that summer in 2018. Today, Sanity is lifting the Sanity offering up to The Content Operating System you dreamed about. For years, we have had the most crucial components: our Database, Live CDN, and a customizable Studio for content workflows. Companies like Burger King, Morning Brew, Expedia, Complex, Skims, and Riot Games have built their elaborate content operations on the platform.

We're taking our offering to the next level by completing the missing pieces of our vision. Sanity is The Content Operating System you need––to accelerate your digital journey and drive consistent and efficient content operations at scale.

Today, we're introducing:

• App SDK for building custom complex Content Applications
• A runtime enabling functions for syncing and automation
• Agent Actions API to drive automated workflows with AI
• AI Agent for automated content operations
• Media Library to manage images and digital files on the same platform as other content
• Canvas, AI-powered writing as an integral part of your creative process
• Dashboard that unifies all your content applications and has Insights, a way to understand what's happening across your content operations

We are very excited about the future of AI in content operations and the beginnings of the full Sanity Agent. Check it out:

Raising $85M to accelerate the transformation

In addition, we're thrilled to announce that we have closed our Series C financing round, which was $85M led by Bullhound Capital with participation from Heavybit, Threshold, ICONIQ Growth, Shopify Blue Cloud Ventures, and Monochrome Ventures. Although we did not need to raise money at this point, the strong performance in recent years combined with the momentum and excitement around The Content Operating System made it feel right.

Bullhound Capital perfectly aligns with the vision for Sanity. Having followed Sanity for years, it quickly became evident that they were the right partner to add to our journey. Their focus on product and their ambitions and expectations around disrupting the content space with AI make them the right partner for us. We are excited to welcome Joakim Dal to our board of directors!

But fundraising is not the main story of the day—the vision to transform how companies think about content and operate internally is the true story. With a strong balance sheet and a strongly performing business, we are set for the next phase.

So, what's ahead?

As we look ahead, we have ambitious plans to evolve The Content Operating System further. While today marks the launch of our vision, this is just the beginning. Our roadmap further accelerates the differentiation from CMS, adding more AI automation features and enabling developers to build applications on our Operating System.

On that topic, we're excited to announce our very first developer conference, Unconference [*NYC]. An invitation-only event in New York on September 30. We'll gather hundreds of developers and technical leaders to celebrate the stories behind The Content Operating System and continue shaping the field of Content Operations.

Further, to level up our community experience, we're moving the Sanity Community from Slack to Discord. This new space will foster better collaboration between developers who want to connect with fellow builders. Join us over there!

A final note from the founders: As always, we want to extend a gigantic and warm thank you to all of our customers and everybody in our community. You are the ones who get us out of bed in the morning and get us excited to continue building our vision as the inevitable Content Operating System. Seeing you build on our product is the most rewarding part of what we do. With today's launch, we hope even more of you feel inspired to tap into your inner builder and start creating.

Keep building!

On behalf of the founders team

Øyvind, Even, Simen and Magnus