What’s ahead for no-code and low-code startups? – TechCrunch
Claris CEO Brad Freitag: ‘It boils down to the scarcity of computer scientists’
Since The Exchange last checked in on the world of low- and no-code startup funding, several more interesting rounds in the niche have bubbled up.
This week, TechCrunch covered a startup called Hevo raising $8 million, and Paragon, which raised a $2.5 million seed round. Hevo is a “data pipeline startup” that helps “clients’ employees to integrate data from more than 150 different sources — including enterprise software from Salesforce and Oracle without requiring a technical background, we reported.
Paragon, part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is a developer productivity-focused service that “makes it easier for non-technical people to be able to build out integrations using our visual workflow editor” according to its co-founder Brandon Foo. Paragon wants to “bring the benefits of low code to product and engineering teams and make it easier to build products without writing manual code for every single integration” to help “streamline the product development process,” Foo added.
And there are more rounds worth highlighting in the space since we last looked, like $4 million for Enduvo (no-code AR/VR), a $3.45 million extension for the fast-growing Turbo Systems (a no-code “engagement platform”), and a seed round for CloudWorx (no-code IoT), among others.
The trend that we noted last week that no-code and low-code startups are raising lots of capital is still hot.
But startups aren’t the only companies working in this space: Apple has long had a foot in the domain via its subsidiary Claris, which rebranded to that name last year after running under the FileMaker moniker. At the time, Claris CEO Brad Freitag told TechCrunch that his company’s vision was to make “powerful technology accessible to everyone.”
That wasn’t merely cliché: Claris’ best-known product, FileMaker, helps users build low-code apps, and its second product is called Connect, a service that helps users link APIs using low-code tooling.
Given that Claris has been in the no-code, low-code space for longer than most, TechCrunch caught up with Freitag again to chat about recent growth in the market category, what he thinks of the low-code terminology, and, of course, his take on startups in the niche.
