Low-Code Space is Heating Up
By: Gayatri Sachdeva
Tags: No Code, Digital Transformation, Low Code, Rapid App Development

It won’t be far fetched to say that we are heading towards a mass migration to low-code as we witness companies in the sector raising at least $500 million in 2020. The year has brought on many unthought-of events for business and the no-code/low-code world is no exception.

The global low-code development platform market size is expected to hit as high as $45.5 billion by 2025 from $13.2 billion this year and it is clear why. The ‘lego-like’ building approach is becoming an extraordinarily disruptive chapter in the enterprise digital transformation story, leading to extensive funding and entry of big tech in the no-code domain.

With latest investments in October 2020 itself — Retool raises $50 million by Sequoia, Unqork raises $80 million via CapitalG. Things began to heat up with the acquisition of a no-code platform by Google in Jan 2020 and Amazon’s entry with Honeycode in June 2020 just strengthened the standing that no-code and low-code platforms are reported to make. It was an exciting event to happen for enterprise focused no-code and low-code players as the entry of the big techs adds a stronger voice that speaks to the c-level.

The real heat, however, comes to light and is interesting to cover, is the massive funding no-code/low-code startups have been able to raise within a short period of 6 months. From sizable of $2 million to an outsized funding of $207 million , no-code platforms and their low-code competitors have clocked in over $500 million (perhaps more) in funding from investors from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Goldman Sachs, World Innovation Lab, Chiratae Ventures, Sequoia Capital , Y Combinator, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Sunley House Capital Management, Eldridge, Accel and Fin Venture Capital, among others.

The facts make it clear that investors’ interests in low-code and no-code are rising and the road to modern application delivery and agile teams is with no-code development. Investment houses are viewing the no-code movement as an opportunistic and interesting theme and have founded interesting founders and platforms (from niche to more general ones) to invest in.

Broadly speaking, low-code and no-code platforms are tools that allow non-professional developers and professional developers alike to employ little (low-code) to no code to build applications, websites, or workflow automations. Low-code/no-code platforms typically feature drag and drop and point and click interfaces to build solutions visually, in shorter spans of time as compared to traditional coding.

In the view of the pandemic, businesses had to switch to new ways of work. While large conglomerates found the transition to be seamless and easy, Low-code was able to give a lot others fresh perspectives on delivering custom solutions logistics and standard operations in order to maintain day to day collaboration. The coronavirus pandemic has amplified the utilization of low-code solutions, as more companies look to tighten their belts and search for new ways to interact with their customers and teams.

The time it takes to build customized automation tools for business without code has made CIOs jobs easier by churning out tools faster and with more precision. By empowering business users to integrate with their commonly used tools — Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and the likes, it is interesting to note that these platforms are helping customers modernize a lot of manual and administrative tasks that were still very dependent on large, complex and difficult to modify legacy systems. Large government bodies, large ITeS firms, restaurantes — No-code technology has successfully enabled customers from various domains to reimagine the way enterprise software is created.

Microsoft expects 500 million new apps to be built in the next five years, with 450 million of those being built using a low-code tool.

Some analysts say that the rise of no-code platforms is comparable to the time before the coming of computer OS that heavily impacted personal computing. Prior to the current GUIs, only specialists could access computers. The pandemic has merely accelerated the changes that may already have been at play in the digital strategies of the organization. Delivering speed and agility at scale is going to be just as crucial in the future as it is now and the question that remains to be answered is if organizations can continue to employ low-code or no-code tools to meet the demands of the business.