Xtype.IO Ltd., the creator of a DevOps platform that accelerates the development of low-code applications built using ServiceNow, said today it has raised $5.8 million in a seed funding round.

The investment was led by Columbia Capital with participation from Inner Loop Capital and SaaS Ventures. Xtype said it will use the funds from today’s round to accelerate its product roadmap, grow its development team and increase its presence in the U.S. market.

ServiceNow Inc.’s low-code application development platform is popular because of its simplicity, enabling companies to build robust and secure business apps quickly using a graphical interface, with minimal coding required. However, while the platform makes software development easy, xtype says users can benefit from implementing DevOps practices in order to update those apps faster and more often.

DevOps refers to a set of practices that combines software development and information technology operations. The aim is to shorten software development lifecycles and provide continuous delivery with high quality. It’s a philosophy that has been widely adopted by application developers.

According to xtype founder and Chief Executive Ron Gidron, ServiceNow is one of the most popular low-code development platforms. But it lacks the agility of modern DevOps processes, meaning it can take weeks or months to deploy updates to apps built using the platform.

What’s more, he said mistakes are so common that they often result in applications going offline. “Manual deployment processes create inefficiencies, delaying releases and leading to costly errors,” Gidron said. “It’s common practice for releases to be scheduled and performed during off-hours in anticipation of downtime.”

Using xtype’s development and release automation platform, low-code application developers have a way to implement new features and functionality on ServiceNow much faster than was previously possible, the company said. Its primary aim is to boost the productivity of citizen app developers and reduce the number of errors that come up when introducing new updates.

It does that by combining modern DevOps practices with advanced automation and synchronization. With xtype, new application releases are fully automated and deployed with a single click, akin to the “continuous integration/continuous delivery” approach employed by modern application developers.

Although its main focus is on pushing out individual application updates faster, Xtype’s platform also provides real-time command and control of user’s full ServiceNow ecosystems. In this way, it can also prevent unwanted changes being included in a new release, with full transparency on what apps have been updated, where and when, and by whom.

Gidron said that xtype is really all about helping low-code developers get the most out of the ServiceNow platform. He said that by switching from manual release processes to a fully automated CI/CD pipeline, users can push out new updates multiple times a day if they wish, as opposed to once every few weeks.

“We see this creating a positive feedback loop for our users, with a wide-ranging impact on everything from reducing merge conflicts and cutting deployment times to increasing development quality and boosting employee satisfaction,” Gidron said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that xtype’s funding shows how ServiceNow is graduating from being a platform to becoming an entire ecosystem. “When startups like xtype can get funding to operate DevOps for ServiceNow to transport and manage low-code and no-code artifacts, it showcases a very interesting opportunity and we will see how it develops,” he added.

Columbia Capital Partner Jason Booma said he invested in xtype because he believes enterprises will collectively build “hundreds of millions” of business applications to support their digital transformation efforts. Platforms such as ServiceNow will play a key role in this development, he added.

“Xtype provides tremendous value by meeting enterprises where they are and dramatically enhancing their ability to build digital tools and products on their platform of choice,” Booma said.

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