Today we’re officially unveiling what we’ve been working on at Builder! After some early wins and exciting customer traction, we are thrilled to share we’ve raised $3.25M in seed funding led by Greylock, with participation from the founders and top executives at Allbirds, Caviar, Harry’s, PopSugar and Warby Parker. Read more in Forbes about our funding.
The proliferation of no-code and low-code tools has been accompanied by big promises, and it’s for good reason. We imagine a world where technology development is democratized so anyone can make their idea come to life with speed and flexibility, regardless of technical expertise. Nowhere is this more critical right now than in ecommerce, where brands need to constantly create unique and optimized shopper experiences to drive business.
Today, the most successful no-code companies that enable people to build digital experiences require users to start from scratch with their technology, rather than integrating into existing systems. Most online businesses (especially larger, established brands), have existing applications and platforms that they’ve invested heavily in and want to expand upon. Starting from scratch wouldn’t make sense.
Enter: Builder, removing the limitations of no-code frontend development
Builder offers no-code software development with a powerful drag-and-drop page builder and headless CMS infrastructure that integrates with any tech stack or platform. We aim to remove the common limitations from no-code development, so businesses of all sizes can create anything they can dream up - from landing pages to shopping sites to progressive web apps.
With Builder, anyone can build and optimize digital experiences. No coding is required, however we uniquely allow developers to import existing code components, like design systems, into Builder’s visual editor. Meanwhile, marketers, product managers, and designers can use existing components, or drag-and-drop to create their own, to build out content, customize the design, target content at different audiences, run A/B tests that don't slow down that site, and measure conversions.
“Every ecommerce merchant rightfully obsesses over conversion, and turning more shoppers into buyers. Yet oftentimes, the ability to move the conversion needle is dependent on engineering work. Modern ecommerce brands oftentimes have limited engineering resources, so the ability to quickly create highly performant pages and experiences and iterate on them is crucial. I wish I had Builder when I was Head of Growth at Stich Fix, and am thrilled to invest in this revolutionary technology."
- Mike Duboe, General Partner, Greylock
Enabling large online merchants to adopt no-code
A common misconception is that midsize and large online brands may not need no-code technology because they have access to software development teams. For this reason, no-code is often associated with providing value to smaller, early-stage companies. In reality, almost every company struggles with finite resources and competing priorities across different teams. No-code technology can provide just as much value, if not more, to larger businesses if it can be flexible and compatible with existing systems. Today, we have well-known brands like Everlane, Vistaprint, Atoms, and many more, all with varying tech stacks, using Builder’s no-code technology to power commerce experiences.
“Working with Builder has been a game-changer. As a headless content platform, it empowers our non-technical teams to create rich, on-brand digital marketing and merchandising content that seamlessly integrates into our shopping experience. Even better, it allows us to launch site experience changes quickly and more efficiently, which directly impacts our bottom line. With Builder, we’re able to see the same quality results that were only previously possible through reliance on our engineering team, who now have capacity to tackle higher-value projects.”
- Dave King, CTO at Everlane
What we learned at ShopStyle
At ShopStyle, my cofounder Brent and I led teams across engineering and product. The product development backlog was constantly overwhelmed with things like new landing pages for performance marketing and growth, new homepage placements for promotions, and new merchandising experiences for the content and commerce teams.
We knew that by empowering more people in the company to build for themselves, we’d be able to move faster and achieve more as an organization. We looked for ways to make this a reality, but the available options either didn’t integrate with our existing sites and apps or still depended too heavily on our developers. Ultimately, these products ended up causing more problems than they solved.
After deciding to build the solution for ourselves, we’re proud to share that ShopStyle uses Builder today. For the first time, the marketing and creative teams are able to completely own critical aspects of their digital properties and user experience, like the shopstyle.com homepage, and easily target different content at different audiences based on locale, previous shopping behavior, and much more. Best of all, they do all of this without constantly relying on their developers, who can focus on tackling the hard stuff.
While we’re excited by the value we’ve been able to bring to companies so far, this is only the beginning for us. We hope you’ll stay tuned as we expand to deliver practical yet powerful no-code visual software development tools to the world. If you’d like to learn more about how Builder can work for your business, visit Builder.io. And if you’d like to join us on this journey, please check out our careers page.
