Kontent.ai Raises $40 Million From Expedition Growth Capital to Bring Power of AI to Content Management

Industry-leading headless CMS Kontent.ai has raised $40m investment from Expedition Growth Capital (EGC) as it becomes a standalone enterprise for the first time and looks to enhance its product by bringing the power of AI into its content management systems (CMS). Powering over 2,000 projects including websites, apps and headless commerce experiences, Kontent.ai was originally started in 2015 as a business unit of 18-year old bootstrapped company Kentico. Today, Kontent.ai employs over 120 employees across five offices on four different continents. As a new independent company, it is ready to hire 100 employees in the next 12 months.

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As more and more businesses look to transform the way they deliver content, Kontent.ai is experiencing high levels of growth. In 2021, global giants such as Algolia, Anaplan, SonarSource, the University of Oxford, Unum Insurance and Zurich Insurance made Kontent.ai their modular content platform of choice. In fact, around the world, increasingly large organisations are choosing a headless content management system because it allows them to centralise content management throughout the whole production process while enabling their developers to choose any technology stack for their digital experience. The headless CMS Software Market is projected to reach $1.6bn by 2027, with Gartner estimating that organisations that have adopted a composable approach, such as a headless CMS, will outpace competition by 80% in 2023 when it comes to new feature implementation.

Owning the headless CMS market

Today’s funding sees Kontent.ai become its own standalone company following seven years as a business unit within parent company Kentico. As a bootstrapped company Kentico has developed two products concurrently, the headless CMS Kontent.ai alongside a flexible digital experience platform (DXP), called Xperience by Kentico. Over the past seven years, Kontent.ai has become a global leader in the headless CMS market, powering content delivery and collaboration at scale.

From a marketer’s perspective, Kontent.ai’s modular content platform helps organisations unify, organise and manage all business content in a cloud-based repository. What sets Kontent.ai apart is its intuitive authoring experience that allows for simultaneous, collaborative work at every phase of the content lifecycle. Using Kontent.ai, content teams can easily plan, create, and review content with streamlined workflows and approvals. The modular content platform allows editors to focus on the content they want to produce, without being held up by structural design choices on how and where that content will be displayed.

There has been an ever greater need for Kontent.ai’s offering following the rise of hybrid and remote working in the last two years, with global companies needing to centralise their content and reproduce their digital experience at scale while their employees are working in different places and across different regionalised use cases. Using Kontent.ai’s content platform, multinational companies are able to ensure consistent content strategies across languages and regions with no need to jump in and out of other apps to collaborate and plan in real time, saving time and money.

At the heart of Kontent.ai’s offering is a belief that both marketers and developers have a stake in the digital experience and by adopting their content platform, a business is unlocking the potential of both parts of their team. From a developer’s perspective, the platform’s modern, microservices-based architecture allows for seamless integration with other applications and technologies. Robust APIs, webhooks, and flexible content models give developers full control over the structure of their content and how it’s delivered to their websites and applications. This ensures that clean, organised content that can be pulled into any experience and technology stack, saving developers time and allowing them to focus on the best way to display information. Whilst the cloud-based content platform means that there are no concerns over maintenance with no downtime or performance issues.

Using AI to push boundaries of content management

As the industry leader when it comes to headless CMS for enterprises, Kontent.ai wants to continue to push the boundaries as they apply to new technologies. Following the new investment, the company wants to bring the possibility and power of composable AI, actioned right from the content platform. Composable AI means applying machine learning capabilities, exactly where it’s needed and distributing it to support specific teams, workflows, use cases, or delivery channels. It is Kontent.ai’s belief that for AI to bring true value, it needs to be purposeful, targeted, and actionable. In achieving these things, AI will enable Kontent.ai customers to improve all aspects of content operations, from creating more relevant content and optimising results to automating repetitive tasks.

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Rapid growth ahead as Kontent.ai and Kentico appoint new CEOs

As part of the announcement, the separation into two separate companies also means changes to the position of CEO. The newly formed Kontent.ai company will be led by Bart Omlo while Kentico will be led by Dominik Pintér. The current CEO and founder of Kentico, Petr Palas will move to the role of Chairman of the Board for both companies. Kentico has recently introduced a new cloud-native generation of its flexible digital experience platform called Xperience by Kentico, a separate DXP tool for midmarket companies which it will continue to develop. Kentico continues to invest heavily in product development and as part of today’s funding announcement, will also receive an additional $20m of committed capital from EGC that will be used to support its growth in the future. Stifel, the global investment bank, assisted Kontent.ai and Kentico with the fundraising.

Kontent.ai’s CEO Bart Omlo said: “With this investment into Kontent.ai, now as its own company, we’re excited to expand our global footprint helping enterprise teams scale their content operations, make the most of machine learning and AI, and deliver exceptional digital experiences. With Kontent.ai’s modular content platform, we push the boundaries of content management to give our customers the competitive edge.”

Oliver Thomas, founder and Managing Partner at Expedition Growth Capital said: “We’ve noted the impressive number of global enterprises that are choosing Kontent.ai for their headless CMS strategy and see huge potential in financing its future as an independent company. By appealing to both content creators and developers, Bart and the team are helping global companies to efficiently scale digital experience across an ever-evolving mix of channels. With AI unlocking even more powerful workflow automation for its customers, we’re excited to see the rewards of product leadership in this exciting category.”

D’Arcy Heath, Head of Digital Marketing and Automation at Unum said: “To be truly omni-channel, we needed a content platform that could support all our initiatives in one place – to be able to create once and publish everywhere. Kontent.ai gives us that flexibility and adaptability. Working with Kontent.ai has brought marketing and IT closer together too. It enables us to leverage combined skills to deliver a scalable, omni-channel SaaS solution, with the customer at its heart.”

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