The Unicorn CTO #125 - No-Code vs AI Code Gen Fundraising

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

As I'm attending the NoCode Summit in Paris later this week, I wanted to dig through previous fundraising transactions to see if there were any interesting investing patterns. And I was not disappointed.

No-code platforms have flourished recently, with 45 companies attracting VC funding between January 2022 and September 2024. While some platforms focus on visual programming for application development, others offer workflow automation or faster backend / API integrations.

But in 2024, no-code funding started to slow down because of a new category: AI code generation. Obviously, there’s a lower number of code-generation startups that raised funding in the same period (28 vs 45). But code-generation startups have attracted much more funding!

While the 45 no-code startups raised $531 million, the 28 code-generation startups raised over $2 billion (including seven transactions above $100 million)! The median amount per round is also very different.

For example, the median Series B was $146 million for code-generation startups vs $24 million for no-code startups. And I’m not even talking about valuation.

Of course, investors might very well be too bullish on AI code generation. But there’s more behind it. No-code platforms are productivity enablers. They allow product-minded users with some level of skills to build applications faster or without developers.

Instead, code copilots/generators promise to replace labour literally. And the software development labour market is 100 times the software market! I'm curious how this will play out and how no-code platforms will adapt to this new reality.

Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.

P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, you can join the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.

P.P.S.: I'm experimenting with a new category - ⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories. Tell me if you want me to keep sharing them weekly.

💰 Market Summary - Week of September 30th, 2024

  • 11 companies raised $237.4 million across 6 product categories in 3 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 3% of the total funding vs 5% for Asia-based companies and 92% for US-based companies.
  • Cloud is the category that attracted the highest funding.
  • 2 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
  • 0 company was acquired.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

OpenGradient, based in New York 🇺🇸, secured $8.5M in Seed funding from a16z Crypto, SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures, and other investors. OpenGradient is pioneering a permissionless platform for open-source model hosting and secure execution, revolutionising how developers deploy AI applications.

TensorWave, located in Las Vegas 🇺🇸, raised $43M in Seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. TensorWave offers a specialised cloud platform for AI workloads, featuring advanced accelerators and inference engines. (more)

Braintrust, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, garnered $36M in Series A funding. Supported by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, and Datadog among others, Braintrust delivers a comprehensive stack for building AI products efficiently. (more)

Distributional, headquartered in Portland 🇺🇸, secured $19M in Series A funding from Two Sigma Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Distributional offers a modern platform for enterprise AI testing and evaluation, focusing on safety and reliability. (more)

VESSL AI, based in Seoul 🇰🇷, raised $12M in Series A funding. Backed by A Ventures and Mirae Asset Securities, VESSL AI streamlines the model training and deployment process at scale. (more)

Lightdash, located in London 🇬🇧, secured $11M in Series A funding from Accel and Shopify Ventures. Lightdash is an open-source BI tool that integrates data modelling and visual analysis, serving as an alternative to Looker. (more)

ApertureData, from Mountain View 🇺🇸, raised $8.3M in Seed funding led by TQ Ventures and WestWave Capital. ApertureDB simplifies the management of images, videos, and related metadata through a unique graph database approach. (more)

Driver, based in Austin 🇺🇸, secured $8M in Seed funding from GV and Y Combinator. Driver is redefining the creation of technical documentation with innovative tools. (more)

Lovable, headquartered in Stockholm 🇸🇪, raised $7.5M in Pre-Seed funding from Hummingbird, byFounders, and other angel investors. Lovable is developing software that enables anyone to create software, aiming to enhance human creativity. (more)

Infactory, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, garnered $4M in Seed funding. Supported by Bee Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, Infactory.ai specialises in AI-powered search solutions. (more)

Vectorize, located in Boulder 🇺🇸, raised $3.6M in Seed funding from True Ventures. Vectorize focuses on converting unstructured data into optimised vector search indexes for enhanced RAG applications. (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

No transactions last week

TheAlgorithms / Python ( 2,922 stars this week) - All algorithms implemented in Python - for education.

microsoft / generative-ai-for-beginners (1,603 stars this week) - Generative AI for Beginners (Version 3) - A Course.

ManimCommunity / manim (1,256 stars this week) - An animation engine for explanatory math videos.

Thanks for reading this far! I'm excited to make this newsletter as helpful as possible and I would appreciate if you could share feedback or anything you want to find here.

Farewell,

Daniel