At FirstMark, we believe that every company is going to become not just a software company, but a data company.
For that to happen, it is essential that technologies that leverage data be democratized. For the foreseeable future, the global demand for digital innovation will continue to vastly outweigh the number of developers, engineers and scientists. Therefore, some of the technical complexity must be abstracted away to enable a broader group of people to build data-driven products and companies.
This trend towards democratization has been a key investment theme for us. Dataiku enables “Everyday AI”, empowering both technical and non-technical users with the building blocks for all things data, from data prep to managing machine learning models. Ada has abstracted away complex ML/AI chatbot technologies, enabling non-technical users to build and run ACX (automated customer experience) departments without writing a line of code.
Enter Softr, a Berlin-based startup with a global user base, which takes this logic even further. Softr is an easy to use, yet powerful no-code platform to build custom apps and portals from your data – starting with Airtable and soon expanding to other data sources (Google Sheets, relational databases, APIs, etc). Softr’s goal is to build the world’s biggest ecosystem for anyone to discover, create, collaborate, share and sell data-driven applications.
We are excited to announce that we are leading Softr’s $13.5M Series A round, alongside existing investors (Berlin-based Atlantic Labs) and a fantastic group of 35 individual investors across the worlds of product, growth and community, as well as unicorn founders.
In addition to Softr’s fast growth, enthusiastic community and great platform, we’ve been very impressed by the thoughtfulness and ambition of its founders: Mariam (CEO) and Artur (CTO) are Armenian nationals who built a company in Germany and bring to the table the level of immigrant energy, drive and resourcefulness that we love to see in founding teams.
While it’s been buzzy for a while, the no code market is just accelerating in earnest, propelled by massive tailwinds. Just like the software world has a variety of tools and platforms, we believe that it will continue to grow explosively into a rich ecosystem with different products serving different needs and audiences. We’re very excited for the ride ahead at Softr.
VentureBeat has the story here.