Backend-as-a-Service startup Appwrite said today it has raised a total of $10 million in two successive seed funding rounds.

The first round was led by Ibex Investors and Seed Camp, while the second was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from individual investors Uri Boness and James Lidenbaum.

Appwrite has created a tool for mobile and web application developers that allows them quickly and easily to create backend apps packaged as a set of Docker microservices. In essence, it does away with the need for developers to create their own backend application programming interfaces. It provides developers with the core APIs needed to build a modern application, abstracting away the boilerplate code, so they can focus only on the front end of their apps.

The tool also makes it easy for developers to integrate multiple sign-in and user authentication methods within their apps. And it includes a database for storing and querying users and team data, storage and file management, image manipulation, cloud functions and other tools.

Founder and Chief Executive Eldad Fux said in a blog post on Medium in July that Appwrite can be thought of as an open-source and self-hosted alternative to Google LLC’s Firebase application development platform, since it provides a lot of similar features and functionality.

Fux explained that he started Appwrite as a side project as he was frustrated with the amount of manual backend work required in application development.

“I started Appwrite to scratch my own itch, but it has quickly become something so much bigger than me,” he said. “Clearly, many developers were having similar challenges with current backend servers for application development, because today we have a team of open-source developers building the product and thousands of new community members every day.”

The advantage of Appwrite is that, because it’s self-hosted and open-source, developers are locked into any production or development infrastructure. Appwrite’s focus on security and privacy means developers also get to own their application data and maintain autonomy.

Appwrite has proved to be popular, with more than 40,000 developers joining its community on GitHub in the last three months, and 250 of those signing on as maintainers, lending weight to its claims of providing a superior experience.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that in today’s digital world, enterprises are building more software than ever before and so development tools are competing to increase developer velocity in any way they can.

“It’s good to see more competition coming to the space with a startup like Appwrite, because the market can always benefit from more competition,” he said. “Appwrite is promising as it’s helping to create a new category of backend-as-a-service in the software development space.”

It’s an emerging category that could one day be worth a fair bit of money for whoever captures market share, as Appwrite cited data that shows the space will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 68% from 2021 to 2027.

“The backend-as-a-service category is on fire and is poised for disruption,” said Chip Hazard, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. “Because Appwrite is built by open source developers for developers, it empowers anyone to build their apps their way across any platform and in any language. We believe Appwrite has the lead on the next generation of BaaS companies.”

Image: Appwrite