A brand new startup is concentrating on the profitable office productiveness area with an open supply method to venture and data administration — and it has acquired backing from a who’s who of buyers from throughout the know-how spectrum.
AppFlowy, as the corporate known as, has raised $6.4 million in funding from a slew of famend founders together with Matt Mullenweg (Automattic); Steve Chen (YouTube); Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub); Bob Younger (Pink Hat) and Amr Awadallah (Cloudera). The seed spherical was led by OSS Capital.
Serving to the workforce be extra environment friendly is massive enterprise, evidenced by the likes of Notion hitting a lofty $10 billion valuation off the again of distant work-driven demand for collaboration software program. Nonetheless, as proprietary software program, companies — significantly enterprises — could be hesitant to go all-in on a know-how they don’t have full management of.
And this, primarily, is what AppFlowy is searching for to handle with a self-hostable answer that goes a way towards addressing safety and extensibility considerations with the incumbent suppliers.
Accessible for Home windows, Mac, and Linux, AppFlowy consists of instruments for managing initiatives, taking notes, monitoring the standing of particular person venture objects, viewing deadlines, creating paperwork, amongst different issues that could be acquainted to people who use related digital workspace instruments.
AppFlowy Picture Credit: AppFlowy
Nonetheless, AppFlowy’s promise is all about management and customizability, permitting corporations to tailor their workspace with modular constructing blocks that may be fine-tuned for particular use-cases. And since it’s open supply, AppFlowy is ready to assist group contributions, which might expedite new performance.
However AppFlowy sees itself as significantly appropriate for industries with tight knowledge privateness restrictions.
“Most proprietary collaboration office instruments share a significant limitation — their prospects discover it too onerous or too costly to have 100% management of their knowledge,” co-founder and CEO Annie Anqi Wang stated in a blog post. “Consequently, vendor lock-in turns into a tricky nut to crack. Customers usually really feel nervous when entrusting their delicate knowledge with these instruments, naturally nervous about their longevity.”
To the cloud
Based two years in the past by Wang, a former product supervisor at ByteDance, and CTO Nathan Foo who was beforehand a software program engineer at TikTok’s mother or father firm, AppFlowy arrived on GitHub underneath a “copyleft” AGPL-3.0 license in November 2021 and went on to cross 30,000 “stars” in its first 12 months.
With $6.4 million within the financial institution, the corporate is now well-financed to construct out the platform right into a moneymaking enterprise. AppFlowy had launched self-hosting through Supabase (an open source Firebase alternative) in early September, serving up knowledge storage for these wishing to host AppFlowy in-house. However alongside its funding, the corporate additionally unveiled a cloud product, designed for deployment on cloud platforms comparable to Amazon EC2 and Azure digital machines.
“Shifting ahead, we are going to assist workforce collaboration and enterprise choices primarily based on AppFlowy Cloud,” Wang informed TechCrunch.
Certainly, whereas self-hosting provides corporations unbridled management of their knowledge, it additionally comes with upkeep prices and challenges that not all corporations will likely be prepared or in a position to cowl — which is the place AppFlowy Cloud enters the fray.
With the promise of end-to-end encryption (E2EE), AppFlowy hopes to courtroom companies which might be hesitant about leaning on the cloud attributable to safety considerations — nonetheless E2EE is completely non-obligatory, and a few companies may choose to not activate full encryption on condition that it limits a number of the issues that customers can do. This consists of real-time collaborative enhancing on paperwork, whereas it might may hinder integrations with sure third-party companies, amongst different impediments.
“Individuals usually need E2EE for the utmost safety, nonetheless, there are a number of the explanation why some folks may select to not decide in for E2EE,” Wang stated. “Customers prioritizing velocity and efficiency may decide out of E2EE, [and] the shortage of restoration choices [will mean] that solely the consumer has the keys to decrypt. A corporation may [also] select to not use E2EE due to the regulatory compliance, knowledge retention insurance policies, and administration issues.”
It’s additionally value noting that corporations can undertake a hybrid native / cloud method with AppFlowy, enabling them to maintain their occasion native and solely sync to the cloud when required.
“This method affords a mix of offline expertise and cloud connectivity, relying on consumer wants and preferences,” Wang stated. “Information is utilized in an area setting, and may be uploaded to the cloud when customers wish to back-up or share it. Nonetheless, customers even have the selection to sync constantly.”
Finally, AppFlowy Cloud may also be the corporate’s ticket to monetization, although it can initially be provided fully without spending a dime.
“We plan to undertake a freemium mannequin for AppFlowy Cloud, which implies that sure premium options is not going to be included within the free tier,” Wang stated. “As these options are nonetheless underneath improvement, there isn’t a paywall for the time being.”
AppFlowy’s cloud platform is on the market in non-public beta now, with its full public launch touted to come back “quickly.” The corporate additionally stated that’s engaged on a cellular app which is scheduled to launch subsequent month, and can assist AppFlowy go totally cross-platform.
