Stellate Handbook
Our Story
The technology behind Stellate was born out of a shared frustration by Tim and Max that GraphQL APIs could not be cached easily.
Tim built the initial prototype of the gateway because he needed caching for another project he was working on. He quickly realized that more people could benefit from a solution to that problem, and started sharing it with friends. One of them happened to be Andreas Klinger.
Andreas knew that Max was looking to leave his last job, and that he had spent months building GraphQL caching to help scale his last startup.
- First introductory email from Andreas to Tim and Max
- Tim & Max spoke for weeks on the phone discussing the problem space.
- Max flew up to Berlin, slept on Tim’s couch for a week.
- After three days, they both knew this was the right fit and immediately raised the pre-seed round
- Here we are!
Vision, Mission
Vision: Stellate is unlocking the world’s data
This is why Stellate exists
Mission: Bring superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs
This is how Stellate is executing towards its Vision today
- We believe GraphQL is the best way to access data at large-scale companies.
- In turn, enterprise adoption of GraphQL is growing rapidly:
Gartner says that “less than 10% of enterprises (not developers) were using GraphQL in 2021 […] and predict that will bump up to 50% by 2025” (source)
- GraphQL turns APIs from a list of endpoints into graphs. This shift in the representation of the data from a mere list of endpoints to a graph leads to the main benefit of GraphQL: flexibility in access to your data.
- This flexibility also explains the main tradeoff of GraphQL in the form of unique challenges to building and operating APIs at large-scale, including performance, security, maintenance and scalability.
- GraphQL is based on a strict specification that every GraphQL API follows.
- This allows us to build tools that help with these challenges once, and then sell them to everybody using GraphQL that needs them!
- That’s why our mission is to bring superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs: build the superpower once; power up everybody that needs it!
- Our current main product is GraphQL Edge Caching, which allows companies in certain industries to significantly speed up their response times, improve their scalability (particularly during traffic spikes), and save costs.