Salesforce enters agreement to acquire Contentful

It’s really exciting to be able to share the news that Salesforce has entered into an agreement to acquire Berlin-based Contentful.

Back on December 10, 2014, I headed to Berlin to meet Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri for the first time. They had started Contentful and my partner at the time, Roberto Bonanzinga had co-led their pre-seed round with Christoph Janz. When we backed the company it was literally two founders, a deck, a name that nobody remembers anymore (StorageRoom – ha!) and, wait for it, a €2M valuation!

Roberto was leaving Balderton and I joined the board of the company which was then doing about $200k ARR. I didn’t know what to expect but loved Sascha and Paolo’s unique combination of visionary perspective (inventing the very concept of ‘headless’ as a way to think about data and content orchestration) and ferocious ambition (a GTM stack that was built even then to scale to $100M+ ARR).

Over a decade later, it’s been amazing to watch the two of them and a huge, changing team of others including, most recently the quietly irrepressible Karthik Rau who has been CEO since April 2024, build a huge business that today powers millions of content sites and experiences including for over 30% of the Fortune 500. The pioneer that invented the concept of a ‘headless’ CMS, today fields over 180 Billion API calls every month!

I’m psyched for the team that they can now take this to the next level with Salesforce announcing today that they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire the company.

We can’t talk numbers here but the good news is that between this and the recent acquisition of Prior Labs by SAP, we think this might be the best quarters for venture-backed exits in Germany since Covid, showing a great return to form. The even better news is that that means everyone here at Balderton desperately wants to make new investments in Germany so we can keep visiting for board meetings! If you think you have Sascha and Paolo’s vision, ambition and grit and are putting it to work building the next big thing, please let us know.

Read the official press release from Salesforce here.