The Future Has No Code: Our Investment in Baserow
We are proud and excited to announce our partnership with Baserow, a powerful and collaborative no-code database, and the talented team around Bram Wiepjes, its founder and CEO. We look forward to joining them on their journey towards becoming the world’s first open-source, all-in one, no-code toolchain.
More than a year has passed since my first meeting with Bram Wiepjes. A year into the pandemic, I dialled into the 8th video call of the day, feeling the zoom fatigue creeping up on me that had been piling up during the last year’s fundraising frenzy. But just a few minutes into the call, my afternoon-dip was completely gone. As Bram spoke about his journey and vision for Baserow, his energy levels were radiating through the screen and I was suddenly reminded of what I love about the VC job.
Already in that first call, which was scheduled for 30 minutes but lasted well over an hour, Bram showed a number of traits we at Inkef believe characterize exceptional founders. Besides his high energy, his passion for the problem that Baserow solves and the product he is building, is highly contagious. He has a bold and exciting vision for the company, which goes far beyond the product as it stands today: to build the world’s first open source, all-in-one, no-code toolchain.
The speed and quality at which Bram had built the first version of the product — all by himself — and the publicly published roadmap, where releases are being delivered like clockwork, were testimonial to an exceptional talent, who started professional coding at the age of 15. The rapid product execution and predictable release cycles reminded us about GitLab, where we saw a similar pattern early on, and which later proved to be a key competitive advantage and success factor for the company. Above all, what makes Bram really stand out as a great founder / CEO is his humbleness, down-to-earth personality and eagerness to learn and constantly improve.
Earlier this year, Olivier Maes, joined Bram as Co-founder and CRO, which was a big milestone for Baserow. As a seasoned commercial leader with a longstanding track-record in the software industry, Olivier is a great counterpart to Bram, and responsible for building out and leading the commercial operations of the company. Since our first conversation early 2021, the Baserow team has grown from a one-man-show to a team of 10 FTEs, spread across the world in a remote-only fashion.
To code or not to code
The hyped no-code/low-code movement is growing faster than ever. It is estimated that by 2025, 70% of new applications will use low-code or no-code technologies. With the promise to increase productivity by allowing anyone to create software without code-based programming, a new breed of companies have emerged, forming a more or less a complete “no-code software stack”. At Inkef, we are big believers that this movement will stay on a similar growth trajectory and we will continue to see new no-code/low-code start-ups emerge for different use cases and sectors. Our view is that, from a cost and time perspective, anything that has been built before should not be built again. Precious engineering resources should be dedicated to building the core product and anything that is unique to a company (e.g. personalized workflows).
We believe that every company will need to become data driven not only to stay competitive but also to simply carry out its daily operations. Embracing low- and no-code, allows companies to create competitive advantage by moving faster, reducing the burden on the engineering team and democratising access to technologies that leverage data.
No-code/low-code use cases go far beyond the mobile apps and website builders like WordPress, Wix, WebFlow, Bubble and Softr, that many people associate these technologies with. Other popular use cases include automated workflow platforms that can create complex integration flows, like Zapier and n8n, work management platforms, like Monday.com, and a range of other business applications such as CRMs, online payments, business intelligence, industrial automation etc.
The backbone of the “no-code stack” is the database platform, which tracks the data that flows through the stack and feeds it across all applications. As with any software application, a no-code app has to run on some sort of database in production. The main benefit of using a no-code database to run no-code applications on, is that it provides its non-technical owners and developers full control of the application and the data that runs through it.
Today, the market leading no-code relational database is Airtable. However, it has a number of known limitations relating to, for instance; capacity constraints, security issues, and limited integrations. Baserow was founded with the mission to build an open source alternative that would solve all the known issues with existing providers, and much more.
The start: a relational no-code database
Baserow’s relational database model was constructed so that data structures can be unified across different applications, making it easier to find the data and optimize the performance of applications using that data. For many years, SQL has been used to write and query data in relational databases. One of the reasons why many people avoid using databases and resort to spreadsheets instead, is the lack of SQL scripting skills. This is where Baserow comes in with its easy-to-use platform, which allows people without SQL skills to create, share and collaborate on relational databases, through an intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface. The potential use cases are almost endless as it is possible to store, organize, and collaborate on information about anything. Over the last two years, Baserow has gained accelerated traction in the open-source community, with users building back-end databases for mobile applications, running AI/ML models on top of the no-code database, or organising marketing campaigns with multiple stakeholders.
Unlike its competitors, Baserow is an open-source platform, which offers customers the choice of SaaS or self-hosting solutions, and frees users from vendor lock-in and security limitations. This is a major advantage for larger organizations, which often have strict data governance and privacy, and therefore cannot make use of many existing no-code tools that are exclusively hosted in the public cloud.
Furthermore, Baserow allows users to customise the platform with personalised plug-ins and gives customers complete freedom to own and manage the applications they develop. As an API-first platform, Baserow integrates seamlessly with any tool needed to build a no-code stack. Finally, with its headless and modular architecture, Baserow is designed for scale to remain fast and stable at huge volumes of data.
The end goal: a complete no-code toolchain
The Baserow product doesn’t stop with the relational database. It is the first piece of a platform that will morph into a broader offering. Baserow’s long term vision is to build the world’s first open source, all-in-one, no-code toolchain: an end-to-end, seamlessly integrated platform, offering application development, database and workflow automation capabilities. The roadmap entails a number of exciting products which will soon be revealed.
All in all, we couldn’t be happier to lead the series Seed round in Baserow together with our friends at firstminute, Frontline and Seedcamp, and to join the team as they are conquering the no-code/low-code movement.
For more information and to sign up visit: baserow.io/
