Softr raises $13.5M to create the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code apps

Mariam Hakobyan • Jan 18, 2022 • 6 min read

What a ride it’s been last year! Since our launch of the Softr web-app building platform at the beginning of 2021, more than 80,000 businesses and operators have started using Softr to build custom apps powered by their data. We have been incredibly overwhelmed by the support and the positive feedback from our passionate community and customer base, who helped grow Softr to where we are now.

Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.5M Series A led by Matt Turck and FirstMark Capital, joined by our existing investors AtlanticLabs and some of the world’s top minds in growth, product, and community.

Matt Turck

Managing Director at FirstMark

"We've been incredibly impressed by Softr, the quality of its platform which beautifully combines power and ease of use, its rabid user community, fast growth and the thoughtfulness and ambition of its founders. We are thrilled to be partnering with Mariam and Artur and look forward to the journey ahead".

Our angel investors include:

Elena Verna (Growth Advisor, Miro, Reforge, Netlify, SurveyMonkey)

Julian Shapiro (Founder, DemandCurve)

Holly Chen (Growth Advisor, Slack, Loom, Miro)

Eli Schwartz (Growth/SEO Advisor, Coinbase, Mixpanel, Zendesk)

Gokul Rajaram (Product Advisor, DoorDash, Coinbase)

Scott Belsky (Founder, Behance)

Brian Balfour (Founder, Reforge)

Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital)

Shreyas Doshi (Product Advisor, ex-Airtable, Stripe, Twitter)

Kieran Flanagan (SVP Marketing, Hubspot)

Cristina Cordova (ex-Head of Partnerships, Notion, Stripe)

Zoelle Egner (ex-Marketing, Airtable, Box)

Kevin Indig (Director SEO, Shopify)

Stella Garber (ex-VP Marketing, Trello, OpenView)

Johnny Boufarhat (Founder, Hopin)

Koen Bok (Founder, Framer)

Christian Reber (Founder, Pitch)

Andrew Edelmann (Director Partnerships, Zapier)

Fereed Mosavat (CDO, Reforge, Slack, Instacart)

Job van der Voort (Founder, Remote)

Packy McCormick (Founder, Not Boring)

Karthik Puvvada (KP) (Program Director On Deck No-code Fellowship)

Paul Yacoubian (Founder, Copy.ai)

Monica Silvestre (Head of Community, Canva)

Nick Franklin (Founder, Chartmogul)

Logos Labs (Shane Mac's & Chris Herd's fund)

Cindy Bi (Capital X)

S16 fund (Andrey Khusid, Oleg Bibergan, Alex Alpern and others)

Andy Young (ex-VP Growth, Entrepreneur First)

Ashley Mayer (ex-VP Comms, Glossier)

Jaclyn Rice Nelson (Founder, Tribe.ai)

Victor Riparbelli (Founder, Synthesia)

Steffen Tjerrild (Founder, Synthesis)

Austen Allred (Founder, LambdaSchool)

Roger Farley (Community & No-Code expert)

Scott Chacon (Co-Founder, GitHub)

Philipp Moehring (Tiny.vc)

Torben Schulz (Founder, Rows)

Ramzi Rizk (Founder, EyeEm)

Florian Meissner (Founder, EyeEm)

Stefan Jeschonnek (Founder, SumUp, Zeitgold)

Jan Deepen (Founder, SumUp, Zeitgold)

and a few others.

See our company page for the full list.

With this funding, a new chapter of Softr’s journey begins. We are building the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code applications.

Today, Softr is the easiest no-code platform to create business apps, powered by Airtable data.

Tomorrow, Softr becomes the world’s largest ecosystem of developers and partners for building no-code apps.

First, starting this year Softr will become a data source agnostic platform that hooks into an organization’s data (Airtable, Google Sheets, Relational Database(SQL), APIs, etc) and empowers the 1 billion knowledge workers to build their own tools to get their job done more efficiently, whether internally with other team members or externally with their clients and partners.

Secondly, companies will be able to extend Softr beyond the platform itself, with the help of three main pillars:

Template marketplace (coming soon): making it easy for anyone to discover, create, collaborate, share and sell their apps in a form of a template,

Component marketplace (by next year): making it easy for anyone to discover and re-use 3rd party components built by a community of developers, and

Softr experts (launched): all the developers, partners, and creators working with Softr will be empowered to build custom solutions with Softr and grow with the ecosystem

Julian Shapiro

Founder, DemandCurve

"Very few companies cause as much enthusiasm and fervor as Softr does. I saw countless folks taking to Twitter to talk about how Softr changed their career paths. It reminded me of my early days at Webflow—something special is happening."

At Softr, we see three core trends that are driving our momentum:

Tech talent shortage: precious engineering time needs to be spent on core product innovation. Business teams like sales, marketing, operations, customer success are left behind and have no way to build and use the tools they need to get their work done internally or externally.

Technology shift: we’re in a new world of work. The entire knowledge worker toolset is being re-thought. The last big B2B technology shift was moving processes and applications to the cloud and mobile. Knowledge workers embraced these tools and have pushed them to their limits. The next frontier is about creativity and customization - custom-built solutions that adapt to your work, not the other way round.

A new generation of tech-savvy, entrepreneurial kids: who want to pursue their dreams and take control of their destiny. They are born in an internet era (more by TC here), use technology from age zero, build their own games, create online stores, are not afraid to try new tools and programs. They are independent, passionate, want to own their life and career - and ‘be their own bosses.

Packy McCormick

Founder, Not Boring

“Almost every kid growing up today will need to know how to create software, but not all of them are going to be engineers. Softr frees up in-demand engineers to focus on things that only they can build, and lets everyone else build apps they never knew they could.”

Softr introduces a fundamentally different approach to building custom apps. Its unique approach is the modular building experience & out-of-the-box business logic. Instead of creating the apps pixel by pixel, it lets you create them using building blocks.

At its core, Softr's units are the building blocks. Each building block represents a logical piece of the application, including frontend, business logic, and backend (Authentication, List/Table, Stripe Payments, Chart, Kanban, Calendar blocks, etc.).

This approach makes Softr easy to use yet more powerful and gives business users superpowers to create customer portals, member-only websites, online communities, internal tools, and dashboards within hours, with zero learning curve, powered by their data.

All the applications created with Softr are also automatically responsive and work great on mobile and tablet.

We want to empower the person who has the problem to build the solution that perfectly fits their needs.

External or internal stakeholders (customers, clients, partners, team members) can have secure access to login into the app, view and update the information that belongs to them - without seeing or modifying the entire underlying database.

Softr’s ease of use and zero learning curve have made it possible for thousands of non-technical creators and makers to build online marketplaces, launch businesses, and make a living off those. Each month, dozens of applications get launched and featured on ProductHunt as #1 or #2 products, all built with Softr. Some of these products have even been acquired.

Karthik Puvvada (KP)

Director On Deck, No-Code Fellowship

“Softr is one of the fastest-growing no-code startups in the market with a buzzing community. The founding team has been shipping features at an incredible rate since the start, building & iterating in public which makes it easy for me to root for them! Having watched them closely over the last few months (within and beyond On Deck No-Code Fellowship), I’ve been impressed by their momentum & vision. Couldn’t be happier to back them as an angel!”

Lukas Erbguth

Principal, Atlantic Labs

"We strongly believe that the democratization of software development has only just started. While there certainly are many no-code tools out there, Softr has convinced us from the outset with their absolute dedication to usability."

Tens of thousands of companies and operators already trust Softr and thousands have become paid customers over the last year. We’ve grown tremendously through word of mouth and virality. our community often describes Softr as the “Canva of web-apps”.

Softr is on a mission to democratize engineering genius and power 1 million apps built with Softr by 2025. And if that feels exciting to you and you want to help us achieve our mission, join us in our journey! We are hiring for all types of roles across product, design, engineering, and community.