Why we invested in Noloco
At some point all businesses face a dilemma when it comes to adopting and implementing new technologies — do we build or buy? This predicament is especially relevant to SMBs for whom the high associated costs and challenges of hiring the right developers are considerable obstacles.
The emergence of the no-code/low-code movement has been a welcome trend to those businesses looking to digitise operations but lacking the expertise and budget. No-code/low code platforms, such as Zapier and Airtable, have enabled significant implementation and cost efficiencies for businesses. Businesses are now able to leverage “citizen developers” to help digitise and automate tasks at a much greater pace and lower costs.
When we heard about Noloco (YC S21), we were immediately intrigued. Noloco is a no-code platform for teams to instantly create apps around their business data. Noloco customers use the platform to create internal tools, customer-facing apps, and custom software around their existing data in spreadsheets and other software tools like Airtable and Google Sheets. All without writing a single line of code.
We participated in Noloco’s pre-seed round in November 2021. Here is why -
- Very focused, passionate, and driven founders with complementing skillsets — Simon (CEO) previously worked in Product at Shazam, TripAdvisor & Revolut and co-founder Darragh (CTO) worked at HubSpot before joining Inscribe (another YC company). We were impressed by Simon’s clarity of thought and vision. In our interactions he came across as a calm and thoughtful leader with laser sharp focus on execution. Similarly, Darragh’s approach to tech architecture was well-thought-out and he was detailed in his thoughts on scaling the infrastructure. Up until that point, Darragh had built the entire platform by himself and was shipping features at a frightening pace.
Today we are already seeing this dynamic play out. The company started hiring a few months ago and have managed to attract top talent which is a tremendous credit to the founding team. Noloco onboarded two fantastic engineers — Matt (ex-Twitter/Microsoft) and Niall (ex-Hubspot).
- Differentiated product with promising early traction — with a few no-code/low-code platforms already in the market we were keen to understand the Noloco differentiation. The team worked hard on combining multiple features, including a UI builder, disparate data sources, granular permissions, and dedicated modules. We were also excited by the product roadmap in which the team identified key features to help further differentiate. What is more, the product was in the hands of customers, and they were loving it. With a small group of customers already paying for it we got really excited.
A few months on from our investment — the company is progressing extremely well and hitting (often beating!) all targets. The product really speaks for itself. Try it out and register here.
- Sizeable and growing no-code/low-code market — 65% of application development is expected to be carried with low code by 2024. According to a no-code census, the reason for this growth is because no-code/low-code is 4.6x faster, 4.6x cheaper and 4.8x easier than coding alternatives. The size of the no-code/low-code market is estimated to be $10 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $187 billion by 2030. This implies a CAGR of 31.1%.
We are excited to be on the Noloco journey alongside Zinal Growth (family office of Guillaume Pousaz of Checkout.com), Marc McCabe of Nomad Capital, TriplePoint Ventures, Enzo Ventures, Accel Scouts, FAST by GETTYLAB,Ben Tossell of Makerpad Fund and other angels.
