Airplane, a versatile software-as-a-service (SaaS) development platform, has announced the completion of a $32 million Series B funding round. Led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Benchmark, this increases Airplane's total funding to $40.5 million. The new capital injection will go towards expanding the company's 19-strong team and product portfolio, ensuring broader market capabilities.
Founded in 2020 by Ravi Parikh and Josh Ma, Airplane aims to fill a gap in the software development market—the lack of internal tools. Ma was previously CTO at Benchling, a cloud-based biotechnology R&D platform, while Parikh co-founded analytics startup Heap. Both recognized the challenges faced by software development teams, particularly in creating and maintaining internal tooling. This realization coincided with a vendor survey reporting that developers spent over 30% of their time constructing internal apps in 2021.
Airplane differentiates itself from competitors like Retool and Superblocks through its developer-centric, code-first approach. This allows developers to build specialized tools and workflows, rather than relying solely on low-code, drag-and-drop application creation methods. Airplane's platform provides easy access to a vast library of tables, forms, charts, and more, capable of integration with APIs and custom components or libraries. Additionally, the platform is compatible with databases and messaging systems, and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, making it an ideal choice for developing powerful internal tools, such as billing dashboards and content moderation queues.
Recently, Airplane unveiled Airplane Views, a framework designed for crafting visual interfaces for internal tooling systems. This development expands Airplane's capabilities beyond its initial focus on code-heavy internal apps, like user data deletion and fraud detection. The introduction of Airplane Views empowers developers to create app components with ease, such as dashboards showcasing key metrics.
According to Parikh, SaaS companies are now using Airplane Views to construct internal admin panels, enabling customer success and support teams to access crucial customer data, account metrics, and account management options. With Views, companies can also create sophisticated fraud monitoring systems, allowing for greater efficiency and ease of use for operations and risk management teams.
Although Parikh acknowledges that it's still early days for Airplane, the platform has already garnered nearly 100 paying customers, including startups like Vercel, Panther Labs, and Flatfile. Additional insights into Airplane's performance include its current revenue, with Parikh stating that the company has multiple years of runway available, even while pursuing aggressive growth endeavors.
In today's world where companies strive to improve efficiency and customer experience, solutions like Airplane can play a significant role in streamlining internal tool development and management. Platforms like AppMaster are already gaining traction among businesses for their capability to simplify the process of building web, mobile, and backend applications with no-code and low-code techniques. Enhancing internal tooling development can bring software development and delivery to new heights, allowing businesses to remain competitive and agile in a constantly evolving market.
