App development can be time-consuming and difficult, but it is often only half the battle. The hardest part is often simply getting the idea into code, which means knowing what open-source components are required to bring a project to life.
This is where Crowdbotics comes in. The startup announced today that it has raised $40 million for its managed app development platform, which allows users to turn “ideas into code.”
The Series B funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investors Jackson Square Ventures, Homebrew, Bee Partners, and Harrison Metal. The new round comes a year after the company received $22 million in funding a year ago in January 2022.
Crowdbotics will use the funding to focus on market education, attempting to persuade users that there is an alternative to low-code approaches, where you can build apps based on requirements and get full code. In addition, the company will expand its product for current customers, and third, it will expand its own features and capabilities, such as adding DevSecOps functions.
In addition, the company intends to expand its current use of GPT-3 by incorporating more of it into the platform. In the future, Kulkarni hopes to allow users to describe what kind of an app they want in specific or vague terms and have it take the users’ actual words and create a requirements framework that the platform can then use to create code.
Crowdbotics is not the same as a low-code/no-code development platform, which allows users to drag and drop components to design the flow of an app and have it built and released for them. Instead, the company asks users to define the app’s requirements, then finds components and offers fully fleshed-out code. That code can then be used immediately as an app or passed on to the customer’s software development team to be tailored to their specific requirements.
Customers can build and launch React Native and Django apps using Crowdbotic’s platform, which includes a visual editor for prototyping, designing, and deploying user interface layouts and backend data models.
The company is also an early adopter of GPT-3, a generative AI model developed by OpenAI that can understand conversational language. It employs GPT-3 to allow users to describe screen layouts or features in plain language, with the platform then providing AI-powered code suggestions. With a single click, these suggestions can be added to the project.
