Democratizing Front-end Development

Why we invested in Candu

Michele (left) and Jonathan (right), the co-founders of Candu

We are thrilled that news of Candu’s latest round led by Two Sigma and CRV is finally public, and we wanted to take this opportunity to share our enthusiasm for this business, its amazing founders, and for the larger opportunity that lies ahead. We also want to share the thinking that led Angular to invest back in 2018.

Some ideas just keep getting bigger and bigger.

A simple demo. When Andrew and I first met Jonathan and Michele of Candu in London in 2018, our discussion focussed on the demo. As they readily admitted, there wasn’t much: At that point Candu allowed customer success teams to embed content — specially videos — directly inside a SaaS application, making it easier for users to get access to the support content they needed in real-time and in context. Rather than be asked to search Google for an answer or to navigate to the application’s “help” tab in a separate window, Candu allowed users to access the full set of content from the learning management system and helpdesk within the app itself.

A much bigger vision. As our conversation evolved, it became clear that the company’s vision was much broader than the simple demo. Jonathan and Michele wanted to revolutionize the way engineering teams thought of application development: the core engineering team should focus on the core product functionality -anything that could be implemented by others should be done by other teams: product, customer success, and even marketing teams should be able to change the way an application works (and looks) on a customer-by-customer basis.

In Candu’s vision, a customer success team should be able to embed whatever content they wanted directly into the applications they managed. If it would help their customers succeed, it should be under their control. But they had to be able to do it in a way that didn’t interfere with the application and didn’t introduce a new look and feel. It should be a truly seamless integration: not a floating icon, not an overlay layer, but seamlessly integrated into the UI.. And non-engineering teams should be able to do this safely on their own without creating havoc for engineering or for users.

Democratizing front-end development. Candu’s vision amounts to fully democratizing the development of an application front-end. That any business user, without writing a line of code, can create an application’s user interface. Amazingly, in a very short period of time, they have put all the pieces in place to make that vision a reality:

• Headless UI builder. Candu is building an engine that scans a SaaS application and automatically templatizes its look and feel so that whatever UI is created in the Candu platform fits seamlessly into the application.
• Best-of-breed templates. Candu offers users a series of templates out-of-the-box that enables them to rapidly start creating impactful front-end experiences for users: Welcome pages, checklists, new feature announcements and more..
• A dedicated CMS. Candu is building a dedicated CMS that allows easy role-based management of content created in the Candu system.
• Dynamic personalization. Candu’s customers can leverage user data to build dynamic segments that serve different UI to different segments and over the course of the user’s lifetime.
• Runtime. Finally, Candu has built a cloud-based runtime environment that actually serves the experiences created on Candu natively within the application itself. Importantly, this platform also collects useful data on user engagement which can be used to optimize the experiences going forward.

Bigger than we thought. Over the past few months, Candu has quietly been rolling its system out to a handful of design partners and pilot customers. We knew the vision was big, but we didn’t know how big. Customers have been using the Candu platform in ways we couldn’t have imagined. For example, one customer asked if individual customer success reps could use the platform to create dedicated dashboards for specific customers — and for the admins managing those accounts. Candu’s answer: “of course.” Customers are smart. As it turns out, once you truly democratize a capability for the first time, users tend to find a ton of clever use cases you might not have anticipated.

Our investment thesis. Ultimately, our investment in Candu was — like every investment we make — an investment in people. Jonathan and Michele are phenomenal entrepreneurs and a great team. It’s been an absolute pleasure to watch them navigate technical challenges, identify opportunities, and steadily solidify their vision into a truly great product. They are domain experts who are motivated to solve this problem from a very authentic place.

Candu touches on a few themes we are very excited about:

• A workflow-oriented system of engagement. Candu will be the system where non-engineers go to build and deploy front-end enhancements to SaaS applications. By positioning themselves as the system-of-engagement in which these blocks are created, we believe Candu will generate some habit-forming stickiness.
• A modular platform. Candu’s power is its modularity. Individuals from various departments can use the same system for different purposes. Better yet, the platform is extensible by design — engineers can create components that non-engineers can use as building blocks to deliver even richer front-end experiences.
• No-code. Candu is part of the massive shift towards no-code. We are excited to watch how Candu will extend the no-code revolution into application development itself. In theory, only the most “core” part of an application should be developed in traditional code. Everything else should ultimately be created in a no-code environment such as Candu to free up critical dev resources Until now, an application’s UX “look and feel” was the key blocker, but Candu has solved that.
• Democratization. Candu democratizes front-end creation — something that benefits SaaS businesses both through increased agility and through better utilization of engineering resources.

We were thrilled to co-lead the company’s pre-seed round with Haystack back in 2018 and are delighted to finally be able to congratulate Candu on their recent financing round led by Two Sigma and CRV.

The best — both for Candu and for no-code front-end development — is yet to come.