Meet the company building content management system for top brands such as Lego, Burberry, Walmart, Alaska Airlines, and ASICS

Contentstack began as a content management system designed to manage and deliver for large enterprises across the globe in sub-milliseconds. Essentially, any brand or company, regardless of size, requires the ability to manage content, and the company’s technology is very horizontal. However, its primary focus is on serving enterprise customers.
We speak to Nishant Patel, Co-Founder & CTO, Contentstack to understand the company better. Excerpts:

Can you tell us about your customers?

We collaborate with over 500 customers, primarily large global enterprises. For example, Lego operates in numerous markets, managing content in 70 different languages to deliver seamless marketing campaigns consistently. Some of our other notable clients include MongoDB, Burberry, Walmart, Alaska Airlines, Icelandair, Mattel, and ASICS, which manages its global content on our platform.

So what kind of content do you do for them?

We’re not in the content creation space. To put it simply, let’s take Mattel as an example—they have 50 brands, and each brand typically has at least one website. Some might or might not have an e-commerce store. Now, multiply this across numerous brands and countries, and the content has to be localized and delivered across various platforms, such as websites, mobile apps, or digital signage. Such companies use software like Contentstack to manage this process.
Regardless of how content is created, it is put into our system and managed within our system. Editors input the content, create translations, and organize workflows and approvals on our platform. The front-end experience is then built and hosted on Contentstack, pulling content through our APIs. For example, when you visit a site like ASICS, the Contentstack APIs deliver the content, providing a seamless user experience on whatever platform the customer is using, whether that’s a website, mobile app, or digital signage.

But are you creating the content for them or that comes to you from them?

No, we don’t create the content ourselves. The content comes from the client. They may have their own content editors or workwith external digital agencies. Obviously with AI, we’ve added features where they could leverage AI to create the content. But we basically manage the content.

What do you mean by manage the content?

Similar to how a newspaper would use a CMS to enter their articles, our system operates in a similar way. Editors typically create content, perhaps using tools like Google Docs, but then they need to enter that content into a content management system. From there, all the workflows, translations, and content delivery to various channels take place. This is the infrastructure we manage.

So, it’s more of a tech platform that you have created?

Yes, it’s essentially a tech platform. Going forward, with the rise of AI, we are also how we can assist with the content creation part as well.

How much of your work is outsourced from India, and what does your team in India look like? Is it a significant part of your operations?

We started in India. We basically came up with headless CMS. It was coined by Forrester, but they gave us credit. We pioneered this concept called headless CMS around the time cloud technology emerged in 2007-2008. Traditional CMS platforms were built solely for the web, but with the rise of mobile and other digital experiences in 2008-2009, we created this concept called headless CMS which separates content from the user experience.
The experience could be anything — digital signage, a webpage, or anything. The concept of separating content from the front-end experience was started out in India. We incubated that in our other parent company before and we seeded that with a bunch of our service customers. In 2018, we spun Contentstack out as a separate company. Today, we have a global presence, with over 500 employees and 300+ are in India. Our entire engineering, besides a few, is all across India. We have teams spread across Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, and Chennai. I wouldn’t call it outsourcing; it’s an integral part of our operations.

How many people do you have overall and how many are from India?

We recently acquired another company, Lytics, so we now have over 500 employees and 350+ of those are based in India, with major operations in the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region, including Australia and Singapore.
Contentstack is present in 14 to 17 countries.

How much funds have you raised so far and how much is the valuation?

We’ve raised around $180 million, a Series C company. We grew quite a bit during the pandemic and it was good in terms of business because everything shifted to digital. We ended up raising series C around that time, although we didn’t have to. We decided not to do the crazy valuations and play the game. Instead, we took the funding and only started utilizing it two years later. Our last round, which was around $80 million, is now being put to use. We didn’t play the valuation game like 30x and things like that around that time when we raised as a reasonable like 13x we don’t have to grow into our valuation. We’ve already outgrown that valuation, so we’re in a good position.

You mentioned that AI is playing a significant role, particularly in content generation and transitioning content across languages. You also shared your interest in

content generation. what is the role of AI that is there in the company right now and how do you plan to expand that?

We’ve made significant investments even before ChatGPT came out, and I think ChatGPT has only accelerated our efforts. We were among the first in our industry to introduce an AI writer, just two or three months after ChatGPT came out. Looking ahead, we believe that technologies like content management and website hosting will go in the background. So some of our background had been in iPaaS integration platforms as a service and we ended up building a full-on automation platform as part of Contentstack. It comes with Contentstack and we’re making a lot of investment in things like AI agents that sit on top of the automation engine that we’ve already built. In terms of writing content, last year we released Brand Kit that basically captures the brand, the essence, the context of a brand for more accurate on-brand
Generative AI results
For example, our customer Golfbreaks, they upload a variety of content, whether it’s articles, images, or brand guidelines that define how Golfbreaks writes and shows themselves to the world. We capture all of this in what we call the Brand Kit. Then our generative technologies use information to create content tailored to Golfbreaks’ specific language and style. What we’re moving towards is a world where editors and content creators can use these tools as a kind of co-pilot. This co-pilot helps them generate content that aligns with the brand’s language.
In addition to content creation, we’re also focusing on experience building. This means brands can automatically build websites and landing pages. The company, Lytics, we recently acquired specializes in customer data platforms. This integration allows us to track how the brand’s website or any other experience performs when it’s launched, providing valuable insights into how it engages with the end customer.
Once you generate or write something, how is it doing outside when it is launched? We gather feedback and feed it back into the generative engine, allowing the next iteration to be more refined and targeted based on specific segments. Much of this will involve co-piloting with the marketing department, eliminating tedious tasks entirely. You will work with the co-pilot to keep iterating to get the segment and the conversion that you want. Hence a lot of things are happening on the AI side at Contentstack.

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