Sep 10

Stellate has been acquired!

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Max Stoiber

Big news today! TL;DR: The Guild is acquiring the product and will be the new home for the product and all customers, while Stellate's technical team is joining Shopify to work on global storefront performance.

Why I decided to go for an acquisition

Over the last 3.5 years, we built a beloved product with near-zero churn. Hundreds of customers trust us to front their production APIs, from fast-growing startups to F500 enterprises. In total, our edge gateway has handled over 100 billion GraphQL requests.

But our growth stalled & the market didn’t expand fast enough to hit the numbers we expected. I considered pivoting, but we would've blown through our investors’ cash and had to shut down our current products, which our customers rely on. 

So, I explored other options and ultimately found a split path: a great long-term home for our products with The Guild and for our amazing team at Shopify.

What does this mean for our customers?

It was my utmost priority that we honor the trust you put into Stellate by ensuring continuity of service even after winding down Stellate-the-company.

I am thrilled that The Guild will continue running Stellate’s GraphQL CDN for all our customers.

Who is The Guild?

The Guild is one of the most widely known companies in the GraphQL ecosystem.

They’ve been involved with the GraphQL community from the very beginning, including being an influential member of the GraphQL Foundation. The Guild is renowned for the many GraphQL open source projects they maintain, including GraphQL Yoga, Codegen, Mesh, and more, many of which we use at Stellate!

The Guild has also created The GraphQL Hive Open Platform - a comprehensive platform to manage your GraphQL at scale with Schema Management, Observability, a Federation gateway, and more.

The Guild will gradually integrate Stellate into its GraphQL Hive Platform offering, giving GraphQL users a complete platform for everything they need to safely run GraphQL in production.

The Guild is known for ensuring the long-term maintenance of the tools that GraphQL developers need. They’ve proven this time and again, not only by maintaining their own tools but also by taking care of existing projects, like GraphQL Tools and GraphQL Yoga. So, I am confident Stellate’s customers will be in good hands.

How will the handover happen?

We have been speaking with their team for the last months, making sure they are well set up to continue running Stellate’s GraphQL CDN and ironing out the details of the handover:

  • We will hand everything to The Guild exactly two weeks after this announcement on September 24th.

  • CDN service will continue uninterrupted for all customers; your production traffic will be unaffected.

  • The Developer Portal and Rate Limiting products will be sunset in two months. We will contact all customers using those products to discuss use cases and potential other solutions you can migrate to.

  • The Metrics product will be merged into GraphQL Hive.

  • We will contact all our enterprise customers this week to set up handover calls to ensure smooth transitions.

Marko Locher, our Head of Customer Success & Support, and I are standing by on all our usual channels to answer any and all questions you might have; please don’t hesitate to reach out.

What does this mean for Stellate’s team?

Most of our technical team (including me!) is joining Shopify to work on global storefront performance, where every millisecond counts. Tobi and team deeply care about performance and have been embracing GraphQL at scale as well as Rust, our language of choice at Stellate.

Personally, entrepreneurship changed my life and made me who I am. So, I can’t wait to play a part in impacting millions of entrepreneurs and the future of commerce at Shopify!

Team members for hire

Some of our team members are not continuing with us on this journey. They are all great people that I would hire again in a heartbeat, so reach out to them if you’re looking for any of these roles:

Thank you

Finally, I want to thank everybody who supported us on this journey. We truly couldn’t have done this without you, from investors to advisors to team members.