Atlanta-based startup Makeswift raises $3m to help marketers build enterprise-class, composable websites

Makeswift, the visual builder for Next.js websites, announced it has raised $3 million to empower marketers to build and manage powerful websites without engineering intervention. The funding round was led by Active Capital, with participation from several other investors including Uncommon Capital and Silicon Road Ventures.

Makeswift introduces a new paradigm for the hand-off between engineering and marketing teams. Instead of hardcoded websites that marketers can't update, engineers can integrate React components into Makeswift's visual builder to give marketing teams custom building blocks. This means marketers can control website content and layout, untangling the workflow of the two teams.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO, Vercel: "Makeswift is extending the power of Next.js and Vercel to combine Enterprise-grade visual building with the powerful frontend cloud of Vercel. We look forward to deepening our partnership with Makeswift to enhance the value we provide to our customers."

Rauch, along with Vercel's CRO, Kevin Van Gundy, and VP of Developer Experience, Lee Robinson, participated in this round of funding. Companies that adopt Makeswift as a part of their headless or composable stack experience:

• Faster time-to-market by reducing engineering cycles on the marketing roadmap
• Less technical debt by isolating custom code to specific React components that serve as visual building blocks for marketers to use and configure
• The ability to incrementally adopt visual editing on a page-by-page basis rather than waiting on a replatform or full stack overhaul
• Simple, intuitive API that works with existing React components
• Support for SSR and ISR out of the box, ensuring that site performance is not impacted by adding a visual editing layer

Alan Pledger, CEO and Co-founder, Makeswift: "We are thrilled to have raised this round of financing from investors that understand how the CMS market is shifting. This funding will help us to continue to improve our product's ability to serve customers with more complex websites. With this funding, we have a solid plan to become profitable in the next year."

For the first time ever, Wordpress' market share started to decline in 2022 (source). Meanwhile, the global Headless CMS Software is expected to expand at a CAGR of 20.44% between 2022 and 2028 (source). Makeswift integrates into a codebase similar to a headless CMS, but the difference is marketers can get started with Makeswift's no-code builder and extend later, preventing costly rewrites.

Pat Matthews, Founder and CEO, Active Capital: "Makeswift has an impressive vision for the future of enterprise website management. We believe that Makeswift is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing trend of companies moving away from Wordpress to frameworks like Next.js for their marketing sites. We are excited to support the company in its next phase of growth."

The funding round comes as Makeswift continues to see strong demand for its product. The company has already attracted thousands of users, from startups to publicly traded tech companies, who are experiencing significant workflow gains by adopting the product.

Hunter Hancock, Lead Solutions Engineer, Recurrency: "Fundamentally, Makeswift changes things for us because it allows our marketing team to maintain a world-class website. It means we're not fighting with WordPress or fighting with performance issues - and not blocking ourselves from creating custom code - all while still allowing the entire website to be visually editable."

Recurrency, a YC -backed startup, is one of the many companies that has moved away from Wordpress, giving their marketing teams more control of their websites without increasing engineering costs.

www.makeswift.com
www.activecapital.com