Siren, the open source diagramming and graphing tool, has long been popular among developers for its ability to create diagrams using a Markdown-like language. As is often the case, Mermaid founder Knut Sveidqvist He created the project because he saw a need for it in his own work as a software architect and then opened it without any immediate monetization plan. Then in 2022, he approached her Open core companies (OCV), GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij's venture capital firm, which then paired him with a serial entrepreneur and investor. Andrew Firestone as its executive director.
Now the company, which builds hosted services around the open source project, announced that it has raised a $7.5 million seed funding round from OCV, Sequoia, and Microsoft's M12 fund (among about a dozen other investors angels).
There is some irony in Microsoft now investing in Mermaid. Sveidqvist tells me that the initial impetus for creating Mermaid was the loss of a Microsoft Visio file. “I had to redraw everything. So on the way home I thought there had to be a better way to do this. It was also the time when the sales were beginning to take effect. Can't we have this as text? That was the idea. Later that night, I sat in the living room with my children. They were watching television and I started the project. They were watching 'The Little Mermaid'. That's why I gave him that name eight years ago.”
At first, Mermaid focused primarily on flowcharts, but over time Sveidqvist added other types of diagrams and the community quickly adopted them as well. And it has become quite popular. Firestone told me that the cloud version of the open source project had 4 million users last year.
Image credits: Mermaid letter
The OCV system involves finding popular projects with smart founders and co-founding a company with them to commercialize those projects. Often that means bringing in a CEO with business experience to complement what is typically a technical co-founder. What also helps, of course, is that these projects already have a track record, which in turn reduces the investment risk quite a bit.
“By combining open source software with the venture studio model, with Sid Sijbrandij's experience, with capital, when you put those things together, you now have these early-stage companies that look like they've been de-risked a lot more. like a Series A. You have a very broad view of the future on product-market fit, which was really special for me coming in,” Firestone explained.
Firestone added that millions of non-technical users need diagramming and flowcharting tools. That's a market Mermaid Chart seeks to address by creating more user-friendly tools for this group of users. But the big picture is significantly broader and isn't so much about disrupting companies like Lucidchart or I look. Mermaid Chart wants to pursue ServiceNow and similar workflow automation services, Firestone told me. But that's still quite far away.
For now, the team is fully focused on developing their service and reaching a wider audience. However, once a company commits to Mermaid Chart, the tool has the potential to become a vital knowledge base, which can then lay the foundation to enable a broader vision of enterprise process automation.
As a text-based tool, there will always be a relatively high barrier to entry, something the team is very aware of. That's why the company recently added a visual editor also. However, that is a voluntary feature. Users who want and like the text-based approach can continue to do so (and switch between the two interfaces at will).
Additionally, to make Mermaid even more accessible, the team also trained its own ai model to allow users to create graphics with the help of a chat interface, for example. For paying users, ai can also fix a diagram when the syntax fails.
“Millions of software engineers around the world enjoy Mermaid's open core, and its software is natively supported by GitLab, GitHub, and others,” said Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab and founder of Open Core Ventures. “Mermaid Chart is expanding the community by bringing the benefits of Mermaid to all types of business users, leveraging ai as a catalyst. “The use cases and business opportunities adjacent to the technology are significant and we are excited to support the team in this next phase of growth.”
Correction: Between my first conversation with Mermaid Charts and today, the team raised more funding and added investors. We've updated the story to reflect that.
