The idea to start CodeSandbox hit Ives van Hoorne when he was on a trip to St. Ives, England. Ar that time, he was working on the conversion of Catawiki to React. While he was gone, he received loads of queries from other developers about React. “But there was no easy way for me to answer them without having access to an editor where I could access the libraries we have,” he says. This realisation instigated him to launch CodeSandbox with Bas Buursma in 2017.
Series A funding
Now the Amsterdam-based company has raised a new round of $12.7M (nearly €10.83M) Series A funding, led by EQT Ventures, bringing its total funding raised to $15M (approx €12.8M). The round also received participation from existing investors, Kleiner Perkins, Arches Capital, and Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch accompanied by new angels Andreas Blixt and Daniel Gebler.
According to the company, this new funding will allow it to continue building the community, providing the tools and support to take it to new heights, including features like opinionated support for larger projects that will unlock new use cases and further existing ones.
Last year, the company raised $2.4M (approx €2.05M) in a seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.
The Sandbox
CodeSandbox is an online code editor that allows users to create a new web application in a single click. The platform handles the setting up of the development environment, the tooling, and the provisioning for the users. This way they can focus on creating the application instead of all the tooling. Users can always share their projects by just sharing the URL. The platform also has integrations with popular deployment targets like Vercel and Netlify and source control providers like GitHub.
With deep integrations to JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, the free sandboxing tool makes it possible to collaborate and build static sites, components, and full-stack web apps almost instantly.
“In an increasingly complicated and fragmented ecosystem, we set out to make getting started with a new web application possible in just one click. When you want to experiment or learn something new, we remove the hassle of setting up a development environment, installing tooling, and provisioning—so you can focus on coding instead,” Van Hoorne says in a blog post.
What comes next?
Van Hoorne believes that the web development ecosystem has only become more complex and fragmented. “Web development is increasingly distributed as product teams embrace remote working, and more people are getting involved in the development process.”
“Designers, testers, product owners, and more all want to give feedback and iterate quickly. But they can’t without asking a developer. Creation should be more accessible, and we’re using this funding to make that a reality. Meaning designers won’t have to go through a developer to tweak the design, and non-developers won’t have to learn git to make simple contributions,” he adds.
Therefore, he reveals that they are building a new platform that would enable the entire product teams and organisations to collaborate on code, using CodeSandbox. “Not by taking local development and putting it in the Cloud, but with a web-first solution that’s faster, more collaborative, and easier to use for the whole team,” notes Van Hoorne.
Pro Workspaces
CodeSandbox is gearing up to launch Pro Workspaces, which is purpose-built for product teams of all sizes to work on code collectively—either to get feedback or code together on ideas.
According to the company, features such as custom npm registry support, private workspaces, and team member management, enables Pro Workspaces to easily integrate with the user’s component library or design system. The waitlist for Pro Workspaces has been opened, and the company will be adding people throughout Q4, ahead of its full release early next year.
Started as the result of a side project, CodeSandbox is currently used by over 2M developers each month, including within organisations like Shopify, Atlassian, and Stripe. “Together, folks have created over 10M sandboxes on the platform, and we’re used by thousands of open source projects, including React, Vue, and Babel, among others,” says Van Hoorne.
Image credit: CodeSandbox
