AMSTERDAM AND LONDON, 06 JULY 2022 – Baserow, an open-source startup building a collaborative no-code database platform, announced it had raised €5 million at its seed round to launch its paid premium and enterprise versions in Q3 2022 and build what is the world’s first open-source, all-in-one, no-code toolchain. The platform enables non-technical teams to capture and organize data to trigger intelligent business insights and automate processes.
“As we launch our commercial offering, we will continue to focus on the needs of our users who want to leverage our platform to manage their business critical processes, but are limited by data governance, scalability and security constraints that make existing SaaS only tools difficult to adopt,” said Bram Wiepjes, Co-Founder and CEO of Baserow. ”This successful seed round will inject additional capital to expand our developer team to further develop the application builder and workflow automation modules.”
“Baserow has found that businesses in the private and public sector space want to leverage no-code tools to create applications, manage data and automate processes for greater productivity, improve citizen services, drive faster time to market metrics and lower costs,” adds Olivier Maes, Co-Founder and CRO of Baserow. “With Baserow, customers get the best of both worlds: user-friendly no-code tools with the openness and flexibility of the open source model. This unique proposition ensures businesses can avoid the general vendor lock-in models available in the marketplace.”
The seed round is led by Amsterdam-based early stage investor Inkef. firstminute capital, Seedcamp and Frontline also participated, as well as several angel investors such as Job van der Voort from Remote, Martin Henk from Pipedrive and Shannon Williams from Rancher Labs.
“We are delighted to invest in Baserow as we are firm believers of the team’s vision to build a full no-code toolchain on the basis of a scalable database. No-code adoption in the enterprise is really still in its infancy with predominantly point solutions and no real winners yet,” says Frank Lansink, Partner at Inkef.
“Baserow is the tool that modern knowledge workers need. We believe that Baserow will be very popular across both the public and private sectors. Privacy is more important than ever. Baserow offers unparalleled privacy without compromising on ease of use and flexibility,” said Arek Wylegalski, Partner at firstminute capital.
Since the pandemic, the low-code and no-code tools sectors have seen a steady growth due to their effectiveness in addressing complex business challenges – particularly the need to digitise workflows, automate processes and improve business efficiencies. According to Gartner, 70% of new applications developed by organisations will use low code or no-code technologies by 2025.
In the past, such innovations would have required the need for software developers with deep technical skills. Today, no-code solutions mean any user, regardless of their experience, can create workable applications collaboratively, quickly and efficiently. Since the launch of the company in 2021, Baserow has garnered over 20,000 sign-ups and boasts more than 10,000 active users.
In 2019, Bram Wiepjes, then a 25-year-old developer, started a side project in which he developed an open-source database spreadsheet hybrid platform to help users curate and make sense of data within their organisations. The project grew to become Baserow. Bram’s software was designed for non-technical users across organisations – from HR and marketing to finance and operations departments – to quickly and efficiently build personalised applications with a scalable database.
Unlike its competitors, Baserow is an open-source platform offering customers the choice of SaaS or self-hosting solutions, freeing users from vendor lock-in. Furthermore, Baserow allows users to customise the platform with personalised plug-ins and gives customers complete freedom to own and manage the applications they develop. As an API-first platform, Baserow integrates seamlessly with any tool needed to build a no-code stack. Finally, Baserow is designed for scale to remain fast and stable at huge volumes of data.
Over the last two years, Baserow has gained steady traction in the open-source community, with users building back-end databases for mobile applications, running AI/ML models on top of the no-code database, or organising marketing campaigns with many stakeholders. Baserow also sees interest from the public sector users where open-source cloud applications are a strategic priority. With more than a thousand sign-ups in June, Baserow’s user base continues growing monthly. Additionally, the company has secured hundreds of sign-ups for its Premium version, which is due to go live in July 2022.
The premium paid version will provide users with additional features including row coloring, row comments, and additional data export formats. Meanwhile, the enterprise version will offer features such as a robust user-management, role-based access control and access to the enterprise team support.
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About Baserow
Baserow is an open-source, no-code database and platform startup, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with a remote-only team across 10 countries. As an API-first solution, Baserow can be integrated with every tool needed to build a no-code stack. The company was co-founded in 2021 by Bram Wiepjes and has over 10,000 active users around the world. Baserow is building the world’s first open-source, all-in-one complete, no-code toolchain. Visit the website to find out more about the company. https://baserow.io/
About Inkef
Inkef is a leading venture capital firm based in Amsterdam with a proven history in backing promising early stage companies in Europe. Inkef takes pride in being a patient, long-term investor with the ability to support companies through several funding rounds all the way up to IPO. From the early stages of being a technology or life science venture, Inkef supports entrepreneurs building their ideas into successful international businesses. Notable investments include, GitLab, Remote, ChannelEngine, Silverflow, iOnctura and Castor among others. www.inkef.com.
About firstminute capital
firstminute capital is a $315m AUM venture fund, investing in seed stage tech companies. firstminute is sector agnostic and invests across the UK, Europe and the US. Backed by over 120 unicorn founders and founded by Brent Hoberman (founder of lastminute.com, made.com, Founders Forum) and Spencer Crawley (Goldman Sachs, DMC Partners) in 2017, firstminute has invested in over 100 companies. https://www.firstminute.capital
