Contentful was founded in 2013 by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri as a response to monolithic and web-focused CMSes.
Contentful's vision was to create a new product category that targeted professional developers and helped them make content programmable. Whereas existing CMSes were architected in the early 2000s to manage page-centric websites, content infrastructure was created with the fast-moving, omnichannel world in mind.