Ebay backs WunderGraph to build an open-source GraphQL federation

Summary

A fledgling open-source startup that’s setting out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured the backing of e-commerce giant eBay. WunderGraph, as the company is called, today said it has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding to “scale its open source GraphQL federation.” Investors include eBay’s VC arm eBay Ventures, Karma Ventures and Aspenwood Ventures. In addition to investing in the startup, eBay is also serving as a core design partner as WunderGraph has set about building an open source alternative to rival GraphQL company, Apollo. “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,” Bryan Woodruff, eBay’s VP of seller experience engineering, said in a statement. Founded in 2020, WunderGraph is the handiwork of CTO Dustin Deus, CEO Jens Neuse, COO Björn Schwenzer, and CCO Stefan Avram (pictured above). While three of the company’s founding quartet are based in Germany, the company has been incorporated in the U.S. since its inception. Miami-based Avram joined the ranks in 2022 to ensure the firm has a strong on-the-ground leader in the U.S. The WunderGraph teamImage Credits:WunderGraph There’s an API for that GraphQL, for the uninitiated, is a data query language for APIs (application programming interfaces) that was developed at Meta (then Facebook) back in 2012 as part of its transition from web wrappers to native mobile apps. The company open-sourced GraphQL in 2015, and later transitioned the project to its own namesake foundation under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. In simple terms, GraphQL lets clients (i.e., applications) request the exact data they need instead of over-fetching data, which increases bandwidth usage and costs, or under-fetching, which may require it to make multiple requests to get all the required data. This makes it more efficient compared to tr...