As virtually every industry scrambles toward digitization, a shortage of skilled developers has held many businesses back on plans to build customized applications. To address the shortage, one Seattle startup has created a tool to allow users with little or no coding experience to build their own apps.
AppSheet was founded back in 2014, and just announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Bay Area firm Shasta Ventures. The company says its “no-code application platform” serves more than 18,000 users each month.
“Our mission is to create an intelligent app platform that empowers every business user to create rich enterprise-grade apps to automate their team and organization,” Founder and CEO Praveen Seshadri said in a statement. “We’re delighted to have our investors support this mission.”
Seshadri, who spent over a decade at Microsoft prior to founding AppSheet, says the startup’s customers use the platform to build internal productivity apps as well as customer-facing services.
There is no doubt that we are at the start of a technology revolution that will allow business users to create their own software solutions.”
AppSheet will use the funding to invest in its technology, build out its customer success and marketing teams and open a machine learning engineering center in Portland.
The platform works by moving a business’ data from spreadsheets to cloud storage providers like Smartsheet, Dropbox, Office 365 and Google Drive. Once it has access to the data, AppSheet users can integrate a number of customizable features like barcode scanners, signature capture, email notifications, GPS and navigation, image capture and charts without writing a single line of code.
The company has worked with businesses in a diverse range of industries, from agriculture to e-commerce, including enterprises like Costco, ESPN, PepsiCo and T-Mobile.
The company has also built a number of sample tools for users to copy and customize, including applications that manage office furniture, log class attendance, chart the U.S. population, factory inspections, track shipments and even organize holiday parties.
Shasta Ventures Managing Director Ravi Mohan was bullish on AppSheet’s prospects in what he sees as a coming revolution in app development.
“We believe AppSheet’s demonstrated success with a broad horizontal customer base is a key indicator of its expected impact,” he said in the statement. “There is no doubt that we are at the start of a technology revolution that will allow business users to create their own software solutions, and there is no doubt that AppSheet is the market-leading platform that will drive this transformation.”
Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates, which led AppSheet’s $1.5 million Seed round in 2015, also participated in the round.
“There is a huge gap today between the automation solutions that a line of business wants and needs, and the ability of IT programmers to deliver,” Venture Partner Greg Papadopolous said. “AppSheet has uniquely solved this puzzle through exceptionally clever automation, which effectively closes the gap for a broad horizontal market.”
