Yahoo Finance Uiflow secures cash and Freshworks partnership to bolster its app dev platform
Uiflow, a company that enables teams to build frontend apps using their existing data, today announced that it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Addition, Transpose Platform and Together Fund -- bringing the company's total raised to $21 million. CEO Sol Eun told TechCrunch in an interview that the infusion will be put toward expanding Uiflow’s team and starting the company's go-to-market motion.
Eun co-founded Uiflow with Eric Rowell, who he met at Workday, in early 2020. While working at software developer Pegasystems, Eun says he saw the importance of lowering the barrier of entry to app development. Workday, meanwhile, further inspired Eun with its architecture for internal low-code software development, which was designed to speed up the development process significantly compared to traditional approaches.
"Software-as-a-service platforms face [the] challenge of scaling their third-party development initiative to empower their customers to expand and customize their platform to meet customers’ own needs," Eun told TechCrunch via email. "[The] software backlog for every company is also getting longer by the day due to pandemic and skill shortage. Most enterprise software development platforms require months of training and certifications before anyone can build, which is why majority of the revenue for these platform companies are from services."
Uiflow aims to help solve this with an app design and engineering platform that works with existing infrastructure -- specifically infrastructure from which data can be accessed via API. Leveraging a visual coding language called Flowlang, Uiflow users can build apps that work with public cloud services, ostensibly while preserving security and deployment on their own servers.
Image Credits: Uiflow
Uiflow recently added support for "multi-page" apps that can be secured behind authentication. And the platform now works with popular authentication services, which can be incorporated into new or existing apps with a few clicks.
"Uiflow empowers dev teams to start from ideal user experience then bring necessary processes and data," Eun said. "The pandemic and the current economic situation will put many companies in a situation where they have to 'do more with less.' Many companies are reducing or planning to reduce their headcount while keeping the rate of innovation to stay competitive. Fortunately, we see this climate as a huge opportunity to push our vision and product to help more companies achieve their goals in software innovation."
Eun demurred when asked about customer metrics, but revealed that Uiflow has a partnership with Freshworks to allow Freshworks customers to build dashboards for ticket handling in Freshservice, Freshworks' IT service management portal. Eun initially claimed that more than 500 businesses signed up for the service, which is currently in beta. But he clarified to TechCrunch in a subsequent email that the number wasn't accurate.
If all goes according to plan, the Freshworks offering will launch in general availability this November and come to additional Freshworks products, like Freshsales, in the subsequent months.
"Since launching our beta user program in June 2021, we have users across more than 800 organizations ... We’ve closed multiple enterprise accounts, and have also tripled our team over the last 12 months," Eun said. "Starting with our Freshworks partnership, we plan to expand to more platforms and become the single customization platform for all major SaaS platforms ... Our goal is to become the best development platform for frontend applications. This will allow us to expand to and backend development easier, giving our customers a full stack of capabilities, while also providing them the choice of what capabilities they want to leverage."
