WunderGraph, an emerging open-source startup focused on solving API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem, has secured significant backing from eBay. The company has raised $7.5 million in a Series A funding round aimed at scaling its open-source GraphQL federation platform.
The investment comes from eBay Ventures, Karma Ventures, and Aspenwood Ventures. Beyond its financial investment, eBay is collaborating with WunderGraph as a core design partner, assisting in the development of an open-source alternative to GraphQL federation products from competitors such as Apollo.
Bryan Woodruff, eBay’s VP of Seller Experience Engineering, explained, “Our investment in WunderGraph’s highly performant open-source platform will help boost eBay’s API ecosystem and enable our teams to work faster and smarter in building products that help our sellers thrive.”
Founded in 2020, WunderGraph was created by CTO Dustin Deus, CEO Jens Neuse, COO Björn Schwenzer, and CCO Stefan Avram. While the company’s founding team is based in Germany, WunderGraph has been incorporated in the U.S. since its inception, with Avram joining the team in 2022 to strengthen its U.S. leadership.
GraphQL was initially developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2012 and has since become a widely adopted data query language for APIs. GraphQL enables clients to request exactly the data they need, avoiding the inefficiencies of over-fetching or under-fetching data, making it a more bandwidth-efficient alternative to traditional REST APIs. As applications increasingly transition to microservices, GraphQL offers an effective solution for managing APIs at scale.
WunderGraph started by building a software development kit (SDK) to unify APIs such as GraphQL, REST, SOAP, and databases like MySQL. However, after securing a $3 million seed round in 2023, the company shifted focus to create a platform for sharing, collaborating on, and exploring APIs.
In late 2023, Apollo, a major player in the GraphQL federation space, transitioned its federation product from an open-source MIT license to a proprietary Elastic License. This change opened a door for WunderGraph to provide a true open-source alternative, which it launched under the name Cosmo.
The partnership with eBay has been a key factor in WunderGraph’s success. eBay’s experience with large-scale systems has played a crucial role in refining Cosmo to meet the needs of enterprise-level clients. Neuse noted that eBay’s input helped them adjust the product to address specific requirements for global-scale businesses.
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