Different organizations and developers do not always speak the same language when it comes to building databases. The platform built by Prisma is based around a server-side library that lets users write in languages that are most intuitive to them, but also lets that work carry across their organizations.
In the words of the CEO, the company's tech works, starting out focusing on GraphQL. More than 150,000 developers are using the open-sourced Prisma ORM for their projects, growing at an average rate of 10% every month.
The plan is to increase investment in that open-source tool to bring on more users, with a view to building its first revenue-generating products. The application data platform will be launched later this year.
The plans for its first commercial steps have attracted investors, and the traction that it has had for the open-source tools. Alimeter is leading this round, with Amplify Partners and Kleiner Perkins also participating. It is a sign of how Prisma is finding its feet in that wider landscape of platforms and tools that some of the company's founders are backing it. They include the founding fathers of Vercel, PlanetScale, and SourceGraph.
One of the reasons that Kleiner Perkins led its seed round was because it was hard to open doors with European backers as a startup that was pre-revenue. The company assumed it would have to completely relocate to the U.S. to continue growing. Fast forward to today, and he acknowledges that a lot has evolved, and they are happily scaling as a business in Berlin.
In the world of development, Prisma is seen as a kind of Rosetta Stone, an object that lets one source of information be rearranged into different parts. There was a wave of programming innovation around 15 years ago, after a period of only three languages.
He said that the older, boring ones saw all the good ideas and those that were supposed to be incorporated into them. Javascript has become a stronger language over time. The move to cloud computing and a preference for using specialized databases has helped the proliferation of database language.
The large tech organizations have invested a lot of money into tooling internally to work around this situation. They may have built something but they won't be able to keep it up with the times. It's hard to be proficient when you have sub-par tooling.
Prisma tooling helps people remain compliant with various languages as they code, query and manage these databases in a more efficient way that speaks to how developers work today.
For the moment, the biggest competition is the approach of the two companies. It's ironic that it was internal building to solve the same issue at a previous employer that led him to the idea of creating a product to solve the issue for everyone.
Jamin Ball, a partner at Alimeter, said in a statement that the way developers build applications is evolving. The Prisma ORM is an important step towards modernizing full stack development.
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