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Introducing Budibase (and congrats on Budibase 2.0!)

The Angle Issue #159: For the week ended October 4, 2022

Author

Angular Ventures
October 04, 2022

Introducing Budibase (and congrats on Budibase 2.0!)
Gil Dibner

Today, Budibase announced the release of Budibase 2.0, a major update to their open-source framework for enterprise-grade internal tools. We first met Budibase in December of 2020, and made the investment a few months later- leading their pre-seed round. Since then, Andrew, David, and I have worked closely with the team to try to help them seize the incredible business opportunities that their outstanding product and engineering skills have unlocked.

Budibase impressed us from day one with a deep commitment to building the right product. At first glance, the “internal tools” space is pretty crowded. Appsmith, Airplane, Bubble, Retool, and Stacker have all laid claim to that mantle — and there might not appear to be much room for a major new disruptive player, much less one hailing from Belfast in Northern Ireland. But as we got to know the team, we began to understand that every time Budibase faced an engineering decision, they always chose the more difficult path. The decision to go open-source. The decision to allow a fully-functional on-premises version as well as a fully-hosted “Budibase Cloud” environment for users that want to get up and running instantly. The decision to empower developers to build fully-extensible applications in code as opposed to a cute no-code app builder. Most importantly, the decision to build their own database layer as a core part of their offering. At each junction, the team chose the harder, more complex, but more “correct” and customer-oriented path. Their decision, for example, to build a database layer is pivotal. It allows them to more easily support any data source, more easily port applications from one source to another, and — crucially — support customers in building custom logic flows and stateful applications — something that would be impossible otherwise.

We believe that only the approach Budibase is taking — the harder, longer, and more challenging one — can result in a platform that can truly support critical enterprise grade applications for the world’s largest and most demanding customers. It’s still early, but the results are beginning to speak for themselves. Open source traction has been impressive. So far, over 40,000 companies have used Budibase in some form. More importantly, perhaps, is that some of these companies are of the type (think defense contractors, major banks, governments) that could (1) never use a hosted no-code solution due to security concerns and/or (2) never use a proprietary (non-OSS) solution due to fears of vendor lock-in on mission-critical applications. One example of this that we can make public is the Bulgarian government’s decision to use Budibase to rapidly build an internal application to manage the influx of Ukrainian refugees. Not only was the application touching highly sensitive data, but it had to scale rapidly (to over 100,000 users). We also know of a government that is using Budibase to track election results. Try that on some of Budibase’s competitors. Budibase was also the only solution that checked all the boxes for Covanta, a company which expects to realize $3.2M in savings due to the elimination of redundant data entry.

With the release of Budibase 2.0, the company is making a number of new features available that will make it even easier for companies to build and deploy their own applications quickly and easily:

We think Budibase is one of the most impressive open source projects we’ve seen in a long time — and on its way to becoming one of the most impressive companies we’ve ever seen.

It’s been awesome to watch Michael, Martin, and Joe build Budibase from (almost) the earliest days. Their pace of product innovation has been astounding, and their relentless focus on what customers need to be successful is inspiring.

If you are interested in how business applications are going to get built in the future, we encourage you to get to know Budibase.

And to our friends at Budibase: Congrats, guys, on the launch of Budibase 2.0! We know you are just getting started!

EVENTS

Feb 15 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

FROM THE BLOG

How to Think About Revenue Quality as an Early Stage Founder
What does “quality revenue” mean when you don’t have much revenue at all?

It’s Not All About Bottoms-up
Two recent trends indicate that we may finally be past the mistaken belief that bottoms-up is the only “fundable” business model in town.

Don’t be Fooled by the PLG Mullet
How to know if you should be building a PLG Now, PLG Later or PLG Never company.

PLG Now, PLG Later, or PLG Never
Why there is no helicopter shortcut to the summit of Mount PLG.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Germany/Health. Sanity Group raised $37.6M for its cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals and well-being products.
Israel/Security. Ox Security closed $34M for its endpoint security solution via its vulnerability assessment.
UK/Financial. Toqio raised $18M for its cloud-based open banking APIs for financial institutions.
UK/Health. Doccla raised $16M for its remote monitoring platforms.
UK/Health. Optellum raised $14M for its AI-based cancer diagnostics platform.
Estonia/Marketing. Klaus closed $11.55M for its conversation review tool and feedback management platform.
France/Ecommerce. Stockly closed $11.55M for its platform, offering an inventory network for online businesses.
German/Industrial. One five closed $10M to transform material science inventions into sustainable packaging products.
Sweden/Security. Detectify closed $10M for its cloud-based vulnerability assessment & audit of websites.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Meta’s AI bet. Text-to-image generators (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion) have been making headlines recently, but something new is on the horizon. Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video, a text-to-video generator. Paper here. The output, while clearly computer generated, is incredibly impressive. Meta is not the only player working on text-to-video. Researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released their own model, CogVideo, recently as well.

What’s next after solar and wind? Economist Noah Smith, also known as Noahpinion, penned an interesting post this past week on the next, great green technology: hydrogen. Solar, wind and battery technology have all followed learning curves, meaning “[a]s we’ve built more of them, [they’ve] become cheaper and cheaper. And the cheaper they’ve gotten, the more we’ve built.” Smith argues that the next technology to follow a similar curve is hydrogen (you can also listen to an interesting interview with physicist Doyne Farmer on “learning curves” and cheap, clean energy here.). Hydrogen got a bad rap because of the failed hydrogen car, but hydrogen is actually great for a lot of other things other than powering vehicles, as detailed by green energy consultant Michael Liebrich here. The killer use case that Smith hopes pans out? Long-term energy storage.

WebAssembly Everywhere. Over the past few months, all of sudden, WebAssembly seems to be everywhere. Renee Shah from Amplify wrote a rundown of her top 18 startups built using WebAssembly in the spring. Over the summer, Luke Byrne from Tapestry wrote this piece on the merits and use cases of WebAssembly. A few weeks ago, Shomik Ghosh of Boldstart, wrote an explainer on WASM. And soon after, Chase Roberts from Vertex Ventures hosted an interesting conversation about WebAssembly with Martin Casado from a16z and a handful of companies driving WASM adoptions (Suborbital, Cosmonic and Fermyon). To be clear, WASM is nothing new (as Francisco Tolmasky makes clear in his thread asking why Figma, which leverages WASM, didn’t usher in an age of WASM-powered web apps), but all of a sudden, perhaps, we’re witnessing a movement.

HOW TO STARTUP

From founder-led to VP-led sales. Point Nine venture partner Seth DeHart published a useful piece on making the transition from founder-led sales to hiring a VP Sales. The whole piece is worth a read if you’re a founder building your sales engine right now, but the key takeaway is as follows: “best performing early stage B2B SaaS orgs have a founder entrenched in the selling process until the engine is running.” And once you’ve narrowed down to a core ICP, hire a “sales pioneer” (Seth helpfully includes some example profiles in the post) who can help you build a repeatable process and scale up to the point where you’re mature enough to hire a VP Sales.

Build, build, build. Bill Gurley’s interview in McKinsey’s The Quarterly Interview: Provocations to Ponder is worth a read. As Gurley says, now may be the best time to build in a long, long time. Easy money is gone, which means so is the distraction that comes from your competitors raising massive rounds. Lease costs for office space have gone down. Layoffs and hybrid work mean more, better talent is available than ever before. His biggest piece of advice to founders (and venture investors alike) is to come to terms with what is happening. We’re not going back to an era of 0% interest rates any time soon. Or, as Gurley says: “in a couple meetings, I’ve heard an owner or founder say, “Well, you know, we just need to buckle down until things get back to where they were.” And I’m, like, “No, the fantasy was the past five years.”

HOW TO VENTURE

LLM on the brain. Sequoia put together an excellent market map of the world of generative AI, that’s well worth a read by any investor (or founder, for that matter) who is interested in understanding the space. Take a look here.

VCs back from vacation. Did venture investors come back from their summer vacations and deploy like crazy in September, as everyone was predicting? It may be too early to say for sure, but Pitchbook’s data says no, as Sarah Hinkfuss from Bain Capital lays out here. The gap in deal count (comparing 2021 to 2022) over the summer persisted into September, with the total dollars raised down 50% and the round size down slightly as well (-16%).

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Budibase 2.0 has launched.

LoudNClear launched their new website — including a new interactive product tour.

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