By Jane Lanhee Lee
(Reuters) - San Francisco-based Webflow, a platform for web designers who do not know how to code, on Wednesday said it raised $140 million at a valuation of over $2.1 billion as investors bet a shortage of coders will give a boost to the so-called "no-code" tech.
While there are other website builders like Squarespace, Webflow chief executive Vlad Magdalin said those were for consumers while Webflow provides more complex functions for companies and web designers.
“No-code is still an early category and a lot of things you still have to do with code. But in the last year, we really saw a lot of companies taking this philosophy and this set of tools as a really business practical way to save costs and move faster,” said Magdalin.
On Tuesday Boston-based airSlate, which helps non-coders build internal workflow systems for things like customer data collection or getting travel expenses signed off by a manager, said it raised $40 million.
Borya Shakhnovich, airSlate’s chief executive, said in addition to a shortage of IT resources, a mushrooming of enterprise software was creating challenges, estimating that companies were using an average of 1,200 different software products. “There's a growing need to have piping between these applications,” he said.
Arun Mathew, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel, said that while the Internet has grown over the last 13 years, there is "still a relatively small number of developers — 20 million people here in the U.S. — that knew how to develop and code for the Internet.”
He added he sees a big opportunity in the field.
Accel, an early investor in Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and Silversmith Capital Partners led the Webflow funding round, which included participation from new investor, CapitalG.