Sanity is a content platform that treats content as structured data rather than pages, giving developers an API-first backend (the real-time Content Lake), a query language (GROQ), a rich-text spec (Portable Text), and a fully customizable React editor (Sanity Studio). Founded in Norway in 2016, it now positions itself as the 'Content Operating System for the AI era,' powering web, mobile, and agentic applications for teams like Nike, Puma, Figma, Cloudflare and National Geographic.
Contentful is an API-first, cloud-native content platform - the company that popularized the 'headless CMS.' Founded in Berlin in 2013, it separates content from presentation so teams can store structured content once and deliver it anywhere: websites, mobile apps, kiosks, smart watches, or AI agents. It serves more than 4,800 brands, including roughly 30% of the Fortune 500, and in June 2026 entered an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce to power the content layer behind Agentforce.
Karthik Rau is the CEO of Contentful, the Berlin-based composable content platform. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer, he founded the cloud-monitoring company SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B in 2019) and earlier helped lead VMware through its 2007 IPO. He took the helm at Contentful in April 2024 to push it from headless CMS into an AI-era content platform.