Startup Deep Dive : Hasura — how do you monetise a database API you give away for free

In February 2022, Hasura raised $100 million and became India’s tenth unicorn, a company valued at roughly $1 billion (about ₹9,600 crore) for giving its core product away for free. That is not really a contradiction. The code anyone can download and run themselves is, in effect, the marketing budget for the version Hasura eventually gets paid to run for you.

Three years on, the company that built its name and its unicorn round on one technology, GraphQL, quietly told its own community that the six-year-old product was no longer the point. In June 2025, Hasura introduced PromptQL and called it the “spiritual successor” to the very API layer that had made it a unicorn in the first place, a reinvention with no guarantee that enterprises want what comes next.

Quick facts

What they do

Hasura sells infrastructure that sits between an application’s database and the people writing the application. Point the Hasura GraphQL Engine at a database, whether Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server or several of these at once, and it instantly generates a GraphQL API for that data, complete with real-time subscriptions and row-level permissions, work that a backend team would otherwise write and maintain by hand. Customers range from developers running the free, open-source engine on their own servers to large enterprises paying for Hasura’s managed cloud service, Hasura DDN, or its self-hosted Enterprise Edition. Hasura’s own customer pages, and coverage of its 2022 funding round, name Airbus, Atlassian, BBVA, Walmart, Netlify, Swiggy and UnitedHealth Group as users of the platform, as reported by Entrackr in February 2022. Since June 2025, Hasura has layered a second, AI-facing product, PromptQL, on top of the same data-access plumbing, aimed at letting AI agents query enterprise data reliably rather than only serving human-written application code.

The origin

Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh started Hasura in Bangalore in 2017. Before Hasura, Gopal had co-founded a software consultancy called 34 Cross, helping larger companies move legacy, monolithic systems to microservices architectures, and had taught one of India’s largest technology MOOCs, reaching a reported 250,000-plus students, according to his own public speaker biographies. That consulting work is where the founding insight came from: every team rebuilding an application for the cloud hit the same wall. Wiring a frontend to a database, and to the other services a modern app depends on, meant writing the same boilerplate backend code again and again, and getting the access-control rules on that data right was slow and easy to get wrong. Gopal has described the underlying problem as making sure “all the right information hits the app at the right time on limited resources such as bandwidth and processing power,” a job he called painful to do by hand, in comments carried by Forbes India’s profile of Hasura’s founders.

Hasura’s first attempt at a product was not the GraphQL Engine the company is known for today. It began in 2017 as a Kubernetes-based platform for deploying applications, and the founders added GraphQL support to that platform’s data APIs as one feature among several. It was only after seeing developers respond specifically to the instant-API layer, rather than the Kubernetes tooling around it, that the team pulled that piece out and shipped it in 2018 as a standalone, open-source project: the Hasura GraphQL Engine, released under an Apache 2.0 licence, according to Hasura’s own 2018 introductory blog post. The platform business was set aside; the spun-out API layer became the whole company.

The struggle years

Hasura’s first hard reset came within a year of founding, when the broader Kubernetes-platform idea it started with was shelved in favour of the narrower GraphQL Engine that developers actually kept using, a pivot that happened before the company had any real revenue to fall back on.

A second, more public setback arrived in January 2023, nearly a year after Hasura had raised its unicorn round. The company overhauled pricing on Hasura Cloud, retiring the free tier and the long-standing $99-a-month Standard plan for new sign-ups in favour of a usage-based Professional plan starting at $1.50 an hour, changes it announced on its own blog under the heading “Updates to Hasura Pricing and Plans.” The response from its developer community was sharp enough that Hasura partially reversed course within weeks, agreeing to grandfather any Hasura Cloud user who had signed up on or before 31 January 2023 onto the old Standard plan indefinitely, both for existing and new projects, as the company detailed in that same post. For an open-source business, whose growth depends on goodwill from the free users it hopes to eventually convert, a pricing change that alienates the community it is trying to monetise is close to a self-inflicted near-death experience.

The third reset is still playing out. At HasuraCon in June 2023, Hasura rewrote its core engine from Haskell to Rust and introduced Hasura DDN, a “Data Delivery Network” built on that new v3 engine, as reported by DevOps.com and Hasura’s own release notes at the time. Two years later, in June 2025, the company went further and repositioned its entire identity around PromptQL, explicitly calling it the successor to the GraphQL approach it had spent six years building a brand around, per Hasura’s blog post “From GraphQL to PromptQL: A New Chapter Begins.” Each of these was a bet that the ground was shifting under the original product before competitors, or customers, forced the issue.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after moment in Hasura’s history is its Series C round, announced 22 February 2022. Going into that round, Hasura had raised a combined $36.5 million across a seed round and two prior rounds, Series A ($9.9 million, led by Vertex Ventures US in February 2020) and Series B ($25 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in September 2020), figures confirmed by FinSMEs’ contemporaneous coverage of the Series B. It was a well-funded but not yet headline-making startup.

Then Greenoaks led a $100 million Series C, joined by existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures, taking total funding to $136.5 million and, in the same stroke, valuing the company at about $1 billion, a figure reported independently by both TechCrunch and Entrackr on the day of the announcement. Hasura became the tenth Indian startup to reach unicorn status, per Entrackr’s report, doing so at Series C rather than after many more years of scaling, which is unusual even by Indian SaaS standards. The round came on the back of real usage numbers: Entrackr reported the Hasura GraphQL Engine had been downloaded more than 400 million times since its 2018 launch and had crossed 25,000 GitHub stars, while Hasura’s own funding announcement cited roughly 4x year-on-year growth overall and about 10x growth specifically on its managed cloud product in the year before the raise. The turning point, in other words, was not a single customer win or product launch; it was the moment usage metrics that had been building quietly for four years converted into a valuation number the whole market noticed at once.

The money behind it

Hasura’s funding has come in four public rounds. It started with a seed round of about $1.6 million around 2017 to 2018, according to Crunchbase’s funding-round records. Series A followed in February 2020 at $9.9 million, led by Vertex Ventures US with participation from SAP.iO, per FinSMEs’ reporting at the time. Series B came seven months later, in September 2020: $25 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Vertex Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC, SAP.iO Fund, and Microsoft’s then-chairman John Thompson joining as an individual investor, also per FinSMEs.

The Series C, in February 2022, was the one that mattered most: $100 million (about ₹960 crore) led by Greenoaks, with Nexus, Lightspeed and Vertex all returning, taking cumulative funding to $136.5 million (about ₹1,310 crore) and pushing the valuation to roughly $1 billion, as reported by both TechCrunch and Entrackr. Each investor’s role is fairly legible from the pattern: Vertex Ventures backed Hasura earliest and stayed through every round; Lightspeed stepped up to lead Series B once the open-source traction was proven; and Greenoaks, a growth-stage investor, came in only once Hasura had metrics, in downloads and cloud revenue growth, large enough to justify a unicorn price. No new priced round has been publicly announced since Series C; as of this writing, Hasura’s last reported valuation remains the $1 billion mark from February 2022.

How it makes money

Hasura’s business model is the classic open-core split. The Hasura GraphQL Engine itself is free, open-source software that anyone can self-host, and Hasura earns nothing directly from that download. Money comes in through two paid layers built around the free core: Hasura DDN, the managed cloud service that runs the engine for customers so they do not have to operate the infrastructure themselves, and an Enterprise Edition with additional governance, security and support features for large, self-hosted deployments. Pricing on the cloud side moved to a usage-based model in 2023, with its Professional tier starting at $1.50 an hour, and larger customers negotiate custom enterprise contracts, per Hasura’s own pricing documentation.

The margin sits, as it does for most open-core infrastructure companies, in the gap between what it costs Hasura to run the managed service, primarily cloud compute and the engineering cost of the product, and what customers pay to avoid running it themselves. The part people tend to get wrong is assuming Hasura’s product is simply “GraphQL,” a query language that is itself free and maintained by the wider open-source community. What customers are actually paying for is the permissions engine (fine-grained, row-level access control mapped to a company’s existing roles), real-time subscriptions, and, with DDN, a single API layer across databases, REST services and other systems that would otherwise each need custom integration code. With PromptQL, launched in June 2025, Hasura is trying to extend that same paid layer, deterministic, auditable data access, into the AI era: the pitch is that large language models can be given natural-language access to enterprise data while permissions are still enforced deterministically outside the model itself, per PromptQL’s own product documentation, rather than businesses trusting an AI model’s own judgement on who can see what.

The numbers

Hasura is a privately held company incorporated outside India, and it does not publish audited revenue or profit-and-loss figures. The only revenue-adjacent numbers in the public domain are third-party estimates, not company disclosures, and this piece treats them accordingly rather than presenting them as confirmed financials. The table below shows what is actually verifiable: funding raised by round, the resulting valuation marker, and the one outside revenue estimate available, clearly flagged as such.

The one filed financial statement traceable to Hasura’s India operations, for Hasura Technologies Private Limited, the local subsidiary, showed near-zero revenue for FY23, alongside a small loss and modest total assets, according to Inc42 Datalabs’ review of the entity’s statutory filings. That is consistent with the India unit functioning as a cost or engineering centre rather than the entity that books global sales, which appear to run through Hasura’s overseas parent, whose financials are not publicly filed. On staffing, GetLatka’s tracked estimates put headcount at roughly 147 in 2022, rising to about 192 in 2023, before easing to around 150 by 2025, again labelled by GetLatka as estimates rather than company-confirmed figures.

Where the money comes from

Hasura does not publish a revenue split by geography, industry or product line, so any breakdown has to be inferred from the customers and use cases it discloses rather than stated as an audited segment split. Its own funding announcements and customer pages point to a mix skewed toward regulated and infrastructure-heavy industries: financial services (BBVA), aviation (Airbus), retail (Walmart), developer tooling and collaboration (Atlassian, Netlify), and Indian consumer internet (Swiggy), per Entrackr’s February 2022 reporting and Hasura’s customer pages. At its Series C, Hasura specifically called out financial services, manufacturing and healthcare as sectors showing strong traction, according to TechCrunch’s coverage of the round.

The surprise, if there is one, is how enterprise-heavy the paying side of the business looks next to how developer-first the free side is marketed. Hasura’s public identity for most of its life has been an open-source project loved by individual developers running side projects and startups; its actual revenue, to the extent any is disclosed even informally, appears concentrated in large, regulated enterprises willing to pay for managed hosting, compliance features and support, the customers named alongside its funding rounds rather than the long tail of self-hosted, free users who drive its download counts.

The risks

The first risk is built into the open-core model itself. Because the GraphQL Engine is free, Apache-licensed software, any company, including a cloud provider with far more infrastructure than Hasura, can host it themselves and never pay Hasura a rupee or a dollar. The business survives only to the extent that some meaningful share of free users convert to paid cloud or enterprise plans, and the January 2023 pricing backlash showed how quickly that conversion funnel can be disrupted when the terms of the free tier change, forcing Hasura into a partial climbdown within weeks.

The second risk is the PromptQL pivot itself. Hasura is asking enterprises to trust an unproven, still-beta product (as of the company’s own PromptQL documentation) with a new job, letting AI agents query production data, right as it steps back from the GraphQL identity that earned it a unicorn valuation and a large open-source following. If enterprises do not adopt agentic, natural-language data access at the pace Hasura is betting on, the company has spent its hard-won brand equity on a category that has not yet proven durable.

The third is competitive crowding in the data-access layer itself. Tools like Supabase bundle a managed Postgres database, authentication and storage alongside GraphQL-style APIs in one product, while PostGraphile offers a narrower but deeply Postgres-native alternative; both compete for the same developers Hasura’s open-source engine was built to win, and reviewers comparing the category note that Hasura’s enterprise licensing can get expensive in multi-region deployments relative to bundled alternatives, a genuine pricing disadvantage against competitors that own more of the underlying stack.

The takeaway

The lesson in Hasura’s history is not really about GraphQL, or Postgres, or even AI. It is that building a beloved open-source brand buys a company time, not permanence. Hasura spent six years and a unicorn round convincing developers that GraphQL Engine was the default way to expose a database as an API, and then, when it judged that the ground was moving toward AI-native data access, it chose to spend that same trust again rather than protect it by standing still. The transferable point for any founder building on open infrastructure is that the moat was never the specific technology being given away for free. It was the willingness, and the balance sheet, to keep rebuilding the paid layer on top of it every time the free layer stops being the thing customers actually want.

Frequently asked questions

What does Hasura actually sell, if its core software is free?

Hasura gives away the Hasura GraphQL Engine as free, open-source software that developers can run on their own servers. It charges for Hasura DDN, its managed cloud hosting service, and for an Enterprise Edition with added governance, security and support features, plus, since June 2025, its AI-facing PromptQL product.

Who founded Hasura and when?

Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh founded Hasura in Bangalore in 2017. Gopal serves as chief executive and Ghosh as chief operating officer, according to Forbes India’s profile of the two founders.

How much money has Hasura raised, and what is it worth?

Hasura had raised a cumulative $136.5 million as of its Series C round in February 2022, when it was valued at about $1 billion, according to reporting from TechCrunch and Entrackr. No new priced round has been publicly announced since.

What is PromptQL and why did Hasura build it?

PromptQL, launched in June 2025, is Hasura’s AI data-agent product, designed to let AI systems query enterprise data using natural language while permissions are still enforced deterministically at the data layer rather than left to the AI model’s own judgement, per PromptQL’s own documentation. Hasura has called it the successor to its original GraphQL Engine business.

Is Hasura profitable or listed on a stock exchange?

Hasura is a private company with no announced plans to list. It does not publish audited revenue or profit figures; the only public revenue estimate, $28.9 million in annual recurring revenue as of December 2023, comes from third-party analytics firm GetLatka and is not confirmed by the company.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “GraphQL developer platform Hasura raises $100M Series C,” February 2022
• Entrackr, “Hasura raises $100 Mn in Series C to enter unicorn club,” February 2022
• Hasura blog, “Announcing our $100M Series C funding,” February 2022
• Hasura blog, “From GraphQL to PromptQL: A New Chapter Begins,” June 2025
• Hasura blog, “Updates to Hasura Pricing and Plans,” 2023
• Hasura blog, “Introducing the Hasura GraphQL Engine,” 2018
• DevOps.com, “Hasura Unfurls Data Delivery Network Based on GraphQL,” June 2023
• FinSMEs, “Hasura Raises $25M in Series B Funding,” September 2020
• FinSMEs, “Hasura Raises $9.9M in Series A Funding,” February 2020
• Forbes India, “SaaS, India: Hasura’s Rajoshi Ghosh and Tanmai Gopal,” SaaS Rising series
• Crunchbase, Hasura funding round records (seed round, 2017–18)
• PromptQL, “About us,” accessed September 2026
• GetLatka, Hasura company profile (revenue and headcount estimates), accessed September 2026
• Inc42 Datalabs, Hasura Technologies Private Limited financials (India entity, FY23), accessed September 2026

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