Amsterdam-based Baserow, an open-source startup building a collaborative no-code database platform, announced on Wednesday that it has raised €5M in its Seed round of funding.
The investment was led by Amsterdam-based early-stage investor Inkef. Besides, firstminute capital, Seedcamp and Frontline also participated in this round along with several angel investors such as Job van der Voort from Remote, Martin Henk from Pipedrive, and Shannon Williams from Rancher Labs.
Capital utilisation
The investment will help the startup to launch its paid premium and enterprise versions in Q3 2022 and build its open-source, all-in-one, no-code toolchain. With the help of the platform, non-technical users can gather and arrange data in order to generate insightful business insights and automate procedures.
Bram Wiepjes, co-founder and CEO of Baserow, says, “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. This Seed round will inject additional capital to expand our developer team to further develop the application builder and workflow automation modules.”
Create an online database without technical experience
As a side project in 2019, Bram Wiepjes, a developer at the age of 25, created an open-source database spreadsheet hybrid platform to help users in curating and making sense of data inside their organisations. This project developed into Baserow. With the use of Wiepjes’ software, non-technical users in an organisation, including those in HR, marketing, finance, and operations, may create custom applications rapidly and effectively.
Co-founded in 2021 by Wiepjes and Olivier Maes, Baserow is a self-hosted open-source online database built with Django and Nuxt web framework. As an API-first solution, the platform can be integrated with every tool needed to build a no-code stack.
Co-founder Olivier Maes, says, “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. 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.”
Besides, the company also offers clients the flexibility to control and manage the apps they build as well as the ability to personalise the platform with “unique” plug-ins.
Recent growth
With customers creating back-end databases for mobile apps, running AI/ML models on top of the no-code database, or managing marketing campaigns with several stakeholders, Baserow has gained steady traction in the open-source community in the last two years.
In the public sector, where open-source cloud apps are a strategic focus, Baserow also observes interest from consumers. The company’s user base continued to expand in June with over a thousand new sign-ups. It has also gathered hundreds of sign-ups for its Premium edition, which will go live in July 2022.
The premium paid version will provide users with additional features including row colouring, row comments, and additional data export formats. Meanwhile, the enterprise version will offer features such as robust user-management, role-based access control and access to the enterprise team support.
According to Baserow, the need to digitise workflows, automate processes, and increase corporate efficiency has been one of the most complicated business concerns since the pandemic, and low-code and no-code technologies have been used to meet these challenges effectively. Gartner predicts that by 2025, low-code or no-code technologies will be used in 70 per cent of new apps created by businesses.
Since the company’s inception in 2021, Baserow has garnered over 20,000 sign-ups and boasts more than 10,000 active users.
About the investors
Inkef is a venture capital firm based in Amsterdam that backs early-stage companies in Europe. The firm believes in long-term investment with the ability to support companies through several funding rounds all the way up to IPO. Some of its investments include GitLAb, Remote, ChannelEngine, Silverflow and Castor among others.
Speaking on the development, Frank Lansink, Partner at Inkef, says, “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.”
firstminute capital, a $315M AUM venture fund, invests in Seed-stage tech companies. It is sector agnostic and invests across the UK, Europe and the US. Backed by over 120 unicorn founders and founded by Brent Hoberman and Spencer Crawley in 2017, firstminute has invested in over 100 companies.
Arek Wylegalski, Partner at firstminute capital, adds, “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.”
