Emerging Indian Saas Leaders: Hasura's Rajoshi Ghosh and Tanmai Gopal

Rajoshi Ghosh (left) and Tanmai Gopal, co-founders of Hasura

These powerhouses of innovation have made the best use of tech and software, and attained unicorn status

To understand the beauty of Hasura, a software engineer might say, one must first understand the importance of Graph Query Language, or GraphQL. It’s a sort of a matchmaker between people building apps, for example, and the data they need, which comes from folks called service developers.

Hasura, founded by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh in 2017, provides this matchmaker for developers to tap disparate sources of data more efficiently—by reducing round trips to the source of the data. It does this by providing a way to make software pieces called application programming interfaces (APIs) more flexible that GraphQL enthusiasts say makes overall app development more efficient.

A simple online purchase for a consumer can be a plethora of asks for information by the app she’s using on a host of interconnected points of data, Gopal explains. Ensuring all the right information hits the app at the right time on limited resources such as bandwidth and processing power, “can be a painful experience”, he says.

GraphQL is seen as the answer by a growing number of enthusiasts.

Gopal and Ghosh secured $100 million in funding in a round led by Greenoaks with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures, the company announced in February.

The Series-C round brought the total capital raised by Hasura to $136.5 million and the company’s valuation to $1 billion. In the coming days, “we will double down on our product engineering”, Gopal says. This includes expanding Hasura’s support to those databases that Hasura doesn’t yet support. “Scaling our go-to-market operations is the second big priority, including a robust customer success team,” he says.