Airtable, a Slack-like coding platform for non-techies, raises $100 million in funding

Yesterday, Airtable, a cloud collaboration service, has raised $100 million in funding. The company has raised the funds to expand its business with more talent and offices outside the US. The company has also catapulted to a $1.1 billion valuation. According to PitchBook, the company was only valued at $152 million, eight months ago in its last round.

Airtable, the maker of a coding platform for non-techies was founded by Howie Liu, Emmett Nicholas and Andrew Ofstad. It uses a simple interface as a frontend to produce apps and other web-based experiences. This interface is built on spreadsheets and other tools familiar to knowledge workers.
Airtable just had 30,000 customers, eight months back. But Airtable’s tools are now used by approximately, 80,000 businesses. One of the major advantages of Airtable is its Slack-like approach to the task of buildings things.

Airtable make it easy for non-developers to code

There are many tools for building apps and other products but usually, they are very technical and complicated. It becomes difficult for those who aren’t well versed with programming. Also, it’s equally difficult and expensive to build apps that solve this problem.

Airtable identified this problem and has built powerful macros under the hood of standard-looking database interfaces. It has made things easy for people who aren’t good at coding. With Airtable, one can customize their own database as per their requirements without relying on someone’s DB model

The competition and the market scenario

Airtable is not the only organization working on this issue. Companies like DashDash and Microsoft and partners are also working in the same direction. Microsoft’s Excel is known to all, Microsoft and partners are now working towards enhancing the functionalities of the spreadsheets. It seems the competition is going to be tough in near future!

Airtable also has a platform called Blocks. Blocks help its users to bring in data from a number of sources. It also lets users select different kinds of outputs. Users can decide how and where the data is to be used, whether it be a marketing campaign across text messaging, an AI-based bot, or a VR experience.

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