Bubble Group Inc., a startup that allows people who aren’t coders to design and create web apps visually, announced today that it has raised $100 million in a funding round led by Insight Partners.

Existing investors SignalFire, Neo, BoxGroup and ThirdKind also joined the Series A funding round.

Bubble’s platform provides a visual engine that makes it easy to develop logical flows without the need for any programming or design knowledge to build apps. With Bubble, users can create mobile-friendly layouts and dynamic content automatically and it handles the scripting behind the scenes for the software.

This is what is called a “no-code” platform, which is designed to allow users with little or no programming knowledge to easily develop and design applications and have the tool do all the heavy lifting for them. They drag and drop elements into place and set up logic using easy-to-understand visual cues.

“This year has shown us that no-code tools like Bubble can create opportunities for people who otherwise couldn’t create software themselves,” said Emmanuel Straschnov (pictured, right), Bubble founder and co-chief executive. “Bubble is still the only comprehensive tool that lets you build the next Airbnb or Twitter without relying on engineers.”

According to Straschnov, this latest round of funding would be used to support scaling the platform itself and also educational efforts for users in building web applications using its tools. The company offers its own academy filled with learning resources that teach users including interactive lessons.

Using Bubble’s visual editor and cloud-hosted platform, users can develop and host web applications for as low as $25 per month and as high as $475 per month for power users. Currently, Bubble says it serves more than one million users worldwide and has processed more than $1 billion in business volume.

The conception of the company, Straschnov told Reuters, came in 2012 when he and his co-founder, Josh Haas (left), started the company in New York because the city was seeing tech startups burgeoning but most entrepreneurs had little or no expertise as programmers.

It took the company seven years to raise its $6.5 million seed funding round in June 2019, which meant that the company spent a lot of time tinkering with its platform and developing a powerful engine to perform in its niche.

Bubble’s features are numerous and include chats, news feeds and other real-time interactivity that can be placed within dynamic containers, which in turn can be stretched to fit and added with a visual editor. There are also many secure data management connectors that can hook into external providers such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other plugins from the Bubble marketplace.

For anything that isn’t handled in Bubble’s core functions, Bubble also provides a developer marketplace that allows expert developers to build and extend its functionality. Its own developer community can provide templates and plugins to account for numerous use cases. In the same portal, they can offer their services as consultants and agents.

Users also don’t need to worry about infrastructure and maintenance of code, since it’s hosted on Bubble’s cloud. In a testament to its own product, Bubble advertises that it built its own website using its service.

Photo: Bubble