Emerging Hull ‘no-code’ software developer February has secured £250,000 in venture capital backing to aid its growth.
Just a year into trading, the business – launched by brothers Ash and Tom Lewis – allows companies and organisations to build their own apps to a template design.
The siblings, who both grew up and went to school in Hull before going into tech, previously worked on another of their successful tech businesses for about six years – Ash.TV – which they realised as a trade asset sale two years ago. They are looking forward to the latest stage of their tech adventure, thanks to the seed funding from SFC Capital, with more research and development, team building, and product honing.
Ash, chief executive of the remotely-operated business, with key figures in the city, Beverley and Cottingham, said: “We started February after identifying a distinct gap in the UK market for a no-code app developer and that the route to that market was quickly achievable with the skills and team we had and were able to pull together.”
The 26-year-old first hatched the idea with brother Tom, 21, after working on labour and cash-intensive app launches in the UK and Europe.
“Since 2020 when we started development on our software that can quickly generate native apps in multiple languages from a visual interface we’ve had a goal that can be summarised in one sentence – anyone can build a modern, powerful app, without any coding or design knowledge.
“App launches can just chew up time, money and hours in their development, but what we started to realise was that about 90 tp 95 per cent of the code used in app development was all pretty much the same or very similar standard logic with only five to ten per cent as unique business logic.
“Building an app, such as a dating app, sounds like a large and complicated task, but with no-code everything from user-interface, user onboarding, user management, reporting management, banning and deleting users, even app promotion can be very simple and straightforward!”
The approach allowed the team to focus on the nature of an app’s ‘backendedness’ – with 50 designs offered up. A soft start with a TikTok campaign last year generated customers, initially offering the apps for free to create market knowledge and a marketing and sector profile, before shifting to a paid model this summer, with levels of involvement from the team seeing prices range from £37 to £449 per month.
“We have had a lot of interest from venture capital backers, partly because there is a lot of interest in no-code software development. It helped that we were already generating income in such a short space of time and had a proven track-record in the tech sector, including in previously raising venture capital funding,” added Ash.
Of the plans for the investment, from an early-stage investment specialist with the backing of more than 350 start-ups under its belt in a first decade, he said: “We’ll be building and strengthening a remote team, one that is as lean as can be, with outsourced contractors including a software engineer and a customer success manager.”
There will also be own app launches, helping to demonstrate the product. Duos is an app which allows people to find a friend to play games with, while Audid – to launch imminently, provides 15-minute book summaries. Tom said: “If we have a good idea for an app – we create it. We’re keen to grow these inhouse apps, and it’s very much a case of ‘let’s get it done’.”
