$41mn Series B Funding Raised: Good, Better, and onto Becoming the Best

‍TL;DR: We just raised $41m in our Series B, led by new investor Insight Partners, alongside Canaan Partners, Accel, and angel investors.

Frontend and backend development for simple applications have become incredibly complicated. It feels like we are building the same things repeatedly but just using different programming languages. The world has about 20 million software developers; most have spent hours building admin panels, forms-based workflows, dashboards, or some version of a CRUD app. That's billions of hours spent building internal apps and doing a lot of repetitive and mundane work. 

My co-founders, Arpit and Nikhil, had spent many years building CRUD apps and were tired of dealing with the same problem at every company. There had to be a better way to build these apps. We decided to release an MVP to a small community that embraced Appsmith with wide-open arms. 

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We started Appsmith with a simple goal: To help engineers build the best apps they can to help their teams while avoiding repetition and monotony.

I am happy to announce that we've raised our Series B to deepen our commitment to that goal. 

First, the lowdown

The lead investor for Appsmith's Series B is Insight Partners, joined by existing investors Canaan Partners, Accel India, and angel investors like Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder, Postman) and Jeff Hammerbacher (Co-founder, Cloudera). Our goal was to bring investors that understood the technology landscape well and were impressed with Insight's track record of backing companies like Docker, Postman, and JFrog, many of which are also open source. As we spent more time with the Insight team, we realized they would be the right partners for us as we scale to the next level. 

And of course, a big mention to our users and community. We're only here because you decided to take your valuable time in using, giving feedback, and contributing to the core product.

‍What have we done so far? 

‍Today, Appsmith is a robust open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining internal tools. Users can connect to any datasource, create UI with pre-built widgets, and deploy business-critical applications.

You can see it in action: 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/722156654?

Appsmith in 100s from Appsmith on Vimeo. Our focus last year was on improving the quality and complexity of the frontend that can be built using Appsmith, a couple of examples of which is our latest theming feature or our in-built JS editor is an excellent way to code.  These are a few among the 150+ features and enhancements we shipped in 2021. 

Where do we go from here?

Over 100,000s developers have used Appsmith for personal and professional projects so far. We see over 7,000 active teams daily relying on apps built quickly on Appsmith. We developed a 3000-member strong Discord community and helped our users build over 100,000 apps. From providing rich support to writing detailed tutorials to contribute valuable integrations, our community and team are the heart and soul of Appsmith. We have loudly and proudly built Appsmith in public and honestly believe transparency and community involvement help us in the short and long term. 

Now, it's time we make it happen for dynamic apps starting with internal apps as our focus.

With this round of funding, Appsmith will build on the progress from 2021. 

Here's a five-point plan for the coming year: 

• Add more UI widgets and Data Integrations

• Simplify the coding and debugging experience

• Investing more in nurturing the community

• Build out a robust set of offerings for advanced or mid and large-sized teams 

• Improve performance of Appsmith apps

Final words

As I mentioned before, this accomplishment wouldn't have been possible without the love, care and support from our team, community, families, and friends.

I want to thank you all again for your continuous support and assure you we don't take it for granted.