8base Inc. today said it has completed a $10.6 million early-stage funding round to build its low-code development platform.

The firm, which has raised $15.3 million in total, said it will use the Series A funds to expand the product’s capabilities and invest in sales and marketing.

8base’s toolset includes features for building data models, custom logic, application programming interfaces, connections to external systems, cloud hosting, security, authentication and front-end applications, all of which the company said can be used to significantly shorten development time.

Unlike the majority of low-code tools, which are aimed at business users rather than professional developers, 8base says it’s seeking to make coding easier for people who develop software for a living. Its product is “a development framework that allows developers to use the skills they obtain through traditional education to work in a framework that significantly speeds up their development work,” founder and Chief Executive Albert Santalo said in emailed comments. “It does this by removing the coding of complex foundational software builds that are required and repeated in every application build.”

GraphQL roots

The company initially built low-code tools for use in creating backends in GraphQL, which is the query language used with graph databases. It enables developers to use JavaScript and MySQL to take a data model to “an entirely generated and auto-documented GraphQL interface,” Santalo said.

The more general-purpose platform incorporates continuous integration/continuous delivery or CI/CD features that support branches, mergers and migrations. The AppBuilder component supports the creation of web applications written in React — a declarative JavaScript library for building user interfaces — and the Material-UI component library.

8base is also focused on scalability, Santalo said. “Maintaining your infrastructure and making sure you have the proper resources to handle scaling in every aspect aren’t things that 8base users have to worry about,” he said. “Our goal in abstracting out everything that goes into growing a product was to let the platform handle infrastructure, support and increased data while allowing users to focus on the important things like company growth and user adoption.”

The company is also committed to avoiding customer lock-in, according to the CEO. “We make it easy for users to come and go,” he said. “Instead of making our users dependent on our platform, our goal is to provide a platform so useful and effective that the only logical choice is to stay and grow.”

The oversubscribed funding round was led by Foundry Group LLC, with participation from MongoDB Ventures, Techstars Central LLC, Firebrand Management LLC, 11 Tribes Ventures, Argonautic Ventures Spc, LAGO Innovation Fund II LP and Alumni Ventures Group LLC’s Strawberry Creek Ventures fund.

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