In this week’s dispatch from our totally normal economy that is absolutely not a bubble, a startup named Bubble has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round.
The start-up advertises itself as a “no-code” platform that will revolutionize software development by letting anyone enter the space. Applications and websites built with Bubble are able to be built without a single line of code, solely relying on graphics user interfaces to build something fresh along with plug-ins to integrate software tools that might require code (like a payment system).
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“No-code multiples the software engineering market by 100X, turning millions of non-tech users into software builders,” claims an investor pitch deck given to Insider. “The market opportunity is immense.”
Bubble’s deck also claims 34 percent of its users have never built anything online, and 70 percent of the applications built with Bubble are customer-facing. The argument goes that this “non-technical, tech savvy group” it’s catering to will only keep growing as the workforce continues to grow up in a digital world with high barriers to entry for development, giving Bubble a chance to profit handsomely by giving them the tools to build startups.
“No-code is now a movement and an ecosystem, with a myriad of educators, agencies, evangelists, thought leaders, tool creators, and entrepreneurs helping each other create the next evolution of technology,” Bubble co-founders Joshua Haas and Emmanuel Straschnov write in a blog post.
All this raises a few questions such as: how much is Bubble generating in revenue (Bubble claims the mystery number has tripled over the past year), is it profitable, what is its valuation with this new funding round, and where do those numbers about a 100x market opportunity come from? None of that is answered either in the blog post or the investor deck. Bubble did not immediately reply to Motherboard’s request for comment. In the meantime, we must follow the startup’s lead and vibe it out.
“At the end of the day, choosing a lead investor is a little bit like getting married. You choose someone that you think you’re going to get along with for a long time,” Straschnov told Insider. “It comes down to intuition.”
