Appsmith Announces $10.5 Million Series A and Seed Funding Rounds to Develop Low-Code Open Source Software

Canaan Partners leads funding with participation from Accel, Bessemer, OSS Capital

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Appsmith, the first open source low code software helping developers build internal tools, today announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Led by Canaan Partners, with participation from additional investors Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, OSS Capital and angel investor Prasanna Sankar, co-founder and chief technical officer, Rippling, the round follows an earlier seed round from Accel of $2.5 million, bringing the total funding to $10.5 million.

The company was founded in mid-2019 and its open source software has been downloaded over 5 million times with users at over 1,000 enterprises in 100-plus countries. It has over 5,000 stars on GitHub and 130 contributors -- 100 of those from outside the company. Appsmith is the first open-source low code software that helps developers build custom (often critical yet tedious) internal and CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) type applications quickly, usually within only hours. For example, a utility company had a complex requirement for a single view of customer data that pulls data from 17 different sources like Zendesk, multiple databases, Salesforce and more. One software engineer created the app in two days that would have taken months of work, and is now used by over 200 users in the company.

Every enterprise needs to create custom applications -- a slow, repetitive, expensive process -- that requires work to build the user interface, write integrations, code the business logic, manage access controls and ultimately deploy the app. By comparison, Appsmith is 10 times faster at enabling software engineers to build the user interface with pre-built components, code the business logic by connecting APIs (application programming interfaces) along with any database, then test and deploy a web application. Companies dedicate anywhere from 10%-40% of their engineering resources to these internal tools. According to Gartner, the low code development technology market is $13.8 billion.

"The low-code market is greatly underestimated and will grow fast as developers adopt new platforms like Appsmith to automate processes required in building custom software," said Joydeep Bhattacharyya, general partner, Canaan Partners. "Appsmith's open-source approach prioritizes the developer experience while also providing flexibility not possible with traditional SaaS. The team is seeing tremendous interest from many sectors and for many different use cases, which only highlights the universality of the problems Appsmith solves."

“Appsmith is addressing the crushing shortage of developers and the need for simplifying the development process through automation,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner, Accel. “The custom internal and CRUD applications are the workhorses of every enterprise which rely on those apps in their operations. Everyone is looking for a solution to turn these around faster and more efficiently. The Appsmith team is well qualified and showing great progress in delivering its open source technology to help enterprises deal with the backlog of internal apps.”

“Everything we do is with the developer in mind to enable every company to build great software that addresses their most pressing internal needs,” said Abhishek Nayak, co-founder and CEO, Appsmith. “We’re taking the pain out of developing internal apps by delivering a highly-customizable platform that uses a building block approach that is open source software freely available to anyone to make it ultra-easy and fast for software engineers to build apps.”

About Appsmith

Appsmith was founded in 2019 with the mission to enable backend engineers to build internal web apps quickly with a low-code approach. Taking an open source software approach provides anyone with access to the software and the opportunity to get involved in the community. The company has offices in San Francisco and Bengaluru, India. For more information visit https://www.appsmith.com.