We are glad to share exciting news about one of our earliest portfolio startups from San Francisco, Zapier. We didn’t share much about financials of Zapier after our investment announcement in 2012 because Zapier did great even with its seed round investment of $1.2M. Zapier’s been profitable since last many years without any funding and even got $5B valuation recently when Sequoia Capital and Steadfast Financial bought its stocks from some earliest investors.
Moreover, Zapier has just bought Makerpad, an online education service focused on training its customers to build apps with no-code. Since Zapier aims to save developers’ time by allowing them to connect apps together with just few clicks and quickly automate their business workflows, this acquisition is beneficial as it will promote the use of platforms like Zapier to the growing no-code community.
Zapier CEO Wade Foster told TechCrunch that his company now has 400 workers and crossed the $100 million ARR mark last summer.
The Makerpad deal is its first acquisition. TechCrunch asked Makerpad founder Ben Tossell about the structure of the deal, who said via email that his company will operate as a “stand-alone” entity from its new parent company.
The deal doesn’t seem prepped to upend what the smaller startup was working on before it was signed. “Ultimately,” Tossell wrote, “Makerpad’s vision is to educate as many people as possible on the possibilities of building without writing code.”
TechCrunch asked the Makerpad founder why this was the right time to sell his business. He said that the pairing would help his team take the no-code world farther than it could alone, also noting that the deal was a “no-brainer” over “alternative routes such as VC funding.”
The no-code space has been active in recent months, as has its sibling niche, the low-code market. The latter has seen recent rounds in the nine figures, as some corporations turn to low-code tools to help them more quickly build internal software. The no-code world has its own successes, like Zapier’s nine-figure revenues.
Foster was neutral on more acquisitions, neither closing the door on them when TechCrunch asked, but not opening it any wider at the same time. On the SPAC question, however, the CEO was a bit clearer. That’s a no.
Please read the full story at TechCrunch.