SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Airtable, a platform that enables anyone to build powerful, custom apps to support their businesses, today announced that the company has raised $52 million in Series B funding, led by existing investors CRV and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Freestyle Capital and Slow Ventures. Additionally, Airtable announced the launch of Airtable Blocks, a major expansion of the company’s platform. Now for first time ever, people with no coding background can build their own workflows utilizing the latest advances in SMS, AI, and VR, by choosing from a growing palette of mix-and-matchable “Blocks.” With 27 Blocks available at launch, Insomniac Events, The City of Los Angeles, and Carnival Cruise Line are just a few Airtable customers already implementing Blocks in transformational ways.
“Blocks introduces workflows that were not previously possible — not only on the Airtable platform, but on any platform before. Custom apps that would have, in the past, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create, and taken months to build by a team of software engineers, can now be made in a matter of days by the end users themselves,” said Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable. “Whether you’re an urban farmer, an interior designer, or building the next Fortune 500, the power of software creation is now available to you.”
It’s estimated that the low-code app development market will grow to $27.23 billion in just four years, a 600 percent increase from where it is today. From nonprofits and small businesses to over 30,000 of the world’s leading companies (including Airbnb, Penguin Random House, and Condé Nast Entertainment, to name a few), a broad range of customers currently use and love Airtable, and that number is growing quickly — 400 of the Fortune 1000 are now on the platform, and revenue grew 500% in 2017. With Blocks, Airtable is taking on the low-code market opportunity with a much more widely accessible DIY software creation platform than anything else that exists on the market.
With the SMS Block, for example, a non-profit can quickly and easily select every volunteer in their database who is based in San Francisco, and send them a text message that a meetup is happening the next day; with the Cloud Vision Block, a music festival can create a dynamic lost and found system that automatically tags thousands of pictures of lost items by colors and object type using the latest advances in machine learning for image recognition; or, with the Mapping Block, a film studio can track in real-time where all of their shoots are happening around the globe, from the status of equipment rentals to a production’s status.
“The meteoric growth Airtable has achieved over the past few years has been best-in-class across all metrics and the market opportunity is one of the biggest we have seen," said Max Gazor, General Partner at CRV. "We believe Airtable is a company that is poised for a singularly large outcome—this could be the next Microsoft due to the enormous size of the opportunity, and the clear path for Airtable to get there. We couldn’t be prouder to work closely with the Airtable team.”
Airtable’s new funding will be used to expand the company’s platform offering significantly in the coming months, open new offices across the U.S., and deliver on its vision to democratize software creation.
About Airtable
Launched in San Francisco in 2015, Airtable empowers creators and creatives to build their own useful software. From collaborative editorial planning, to managing global marketing campaigns, to powering the entire back office of an organization, Airtable makes it easy for anyone to create custom, collaborative workflows to suit their specific business needs. The company has raised $62.6 million in funding from notable investors including: CRV, Caffeinated Capital, Freestyle Capital, Box Group, Founder Collective, CrunchFund, and Data Collective. To learn more, visit Airtable.com.