Toronto-based Deskree, a no-code cloud infrastructure tool, announced that it has raised $1.5M (approximately €1.4M) in a Seed round of funding to help developers create backend infrastructure without a single line of code.
Forum Ventures, Hustle Fund, N49P, Flair Ventures, ZAKA VC, League of Innovators, Flyer One Ventures, AAl VC, and Vesna Capital participated in the funding round.
Deskree says it will use the investment to attract more users worldwide, develop new products, and partner with more cloud providers in the next 12 months, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Birth of Deskree
Typically, it takes over 20 weeks and costs over $100K to set up the backend for a new project.
Dmytro Grechko founded Deskree in 2021 as an internal project of Deskree Studio, aiming to address the struggles in finding a cost-effective and efficient solution for backend infrastructure.
In an exclusive interview with Silicon Canals, Dmytro Grechko, CEO and founder, says, “When I was running a software development agency, Deskree Studio, my team would do the same things over and over again for each client — we’d get their infrastructure up and running and build backends for them.”
“Clients paid hourly, which was quite expensive for them. For us, it was simply boring to do the same repetitive tasks. So, we first created a tool with pre-made modules to use internally. We used it for different projects, which significantly sped up our work,” he continues.
“After building dozens of projects and speaking with clients, we realised the need for our tool outside of our agency. Clients started asking if they could use it, too. That’s how Deskree was born,” adds Grechko.
What does Deskree do?
Deskree is a versatile platform that caters to the needs of startups, medium businesses, and enterprises.
The platform simplifies backend infrastructure creation by eliminating the need for expensive DevOps and cloud architect specialists.
“I could never understand why cloud infrastructure was so unnecessarily complicated and why business owners should pay a fortune to set it up. With Deskree, a startup can build complex backend infrastructure in minutes,” Grechko says.
Deskree offers a user-friendly web interface that allows customers to configure their infrastructure requirements, which Deskree then builds.
“A customer comes in and says, “I want a database.” They configure everything in the interface, and we — having analysed that — create infrastructure for them,” Grechko cites an example.
Without Deskree, users would face the complexity of understanding various cloud providers and services, along with the associated costs, networking, monitoring, and security considerations.
“It takes more time and money and does not always guarantee a good result,” he adds.
What makes Deskree stand out?
According to Grechko, Deskree distinguishes itself from other Backend as a Service (BaaS) startups that emphasise database management by providing separate infrastructure for each project, granting clients ownership and autonomy.
“When people buy a service, they want ownership over it; they don’t want to depend on go-betweens. So while other BaaS startups offer a black box, we provide an independent solution,” states Grechko.
Besides, it is a low-code tool, enabling clients without DevOps expertise to construct enterprise-level infrastructure easily. Every project built on Deskree is a standalone microservice infrastructure created on Google Cloud.
Grechko highlights one of Deskree’s success stories: “Our client created a backend for a platform in 4 days instead of the four months he originally planned. It was a global industrial cleaning supply company that budgeted $40,000 on that; it spent just $400. We then scaled the project from 100 API requests per hour to 1.5 billion requests.”
Consequently, the number of Deskree users has grown from 300 to 10,000 developers worldwide over the last year. Most of them are based in North & South America.
What the investors say
“Startup founders spend a lot of money and time building cloud infrastructure: they hire freelancers or large teams of expensive developers and wait for weeks until the backend for their project is ready. Deskree is making their lives much easier,” says Vital Laptenok, general partner at Flyer One Ventures.
“A company using their tool can have just one developer on the team, which will be enough to roll out the backend they need — in minutes,” adds Laptenok.
“Deskree’s product makes it easier for developers to do what they were meant to do — to build great products that users love,” says Jonah Midanik, general partner of Forum Ventures. “We are proud to support the Deskree team on this mission.”
“Deskree provides a tool for complex backend projects, where other no-code development platforms are limited,” says Andrej Petrus, CIO of ZAKA VC. “The company is stepping up the no-code development segment by simplifying and democratising the backend infrastructure complexities and allowing, therefore, to decrease the cost and time of deployment even more.”
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