A brand new startup is concentrating on the profitable office productiveness house with an open supply method to mission and information administration — and it has obtained backing from a who’s who of buyers from throughout the expertise spectrum.
AppFlowy, as the corporate is 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. Nevertheless, as proprietary software program, companies — notably enterprises — is perhaps hesitant to go all-in on a expertise they don’t have full management of.
And this, basically, is what AppFlowy is in search of to handle with a self-hostable resolution that goes a way towards addressing safety and extensibility issues with the incumbent suppliers.
Obtainable for Home windows, Mac, and Linux, AppFlowy contains instruments for managing tasks, taking notes, monitoring the standing of particular person mission objects, viewing deadlines, creating paperwork, amongst different issues that is perhaps acquainted to people who use comparable digital workspace instruments.
AppFlowy Picture Credit: AppFlowy
Nevertheless, 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 help neighborhood contributions, which may expedite new performance.
However AppFlowy sees itself as notably appropriate for industries with tight knowledge privateness restrictions.
“Most proprietary collaboration office instruments share a serious limitation — their prospects discover it too arduous or too costly to have 100% management of their knowledge,” co-founder and CEO Annie Anqi Wang stated in a weblog publish. “Because of this, vendor lock-in turns into a troublesome nut to crack. Customers typically 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 father or mother firm, AppFlowy arrived on GitHub beneath a “copyleft” AGPL-3.0 license in November 2021 and went on to move 30,000 “stars” in its first yr.
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 by way of Supabase (an open supply Firebase various) 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 akin to Amazon EC2 and Azure digital machines.
“Transferring ahead, we are going to help workforce collaboration and enterprise choices based mostly on AppFlowy Cloud,” Wang instructed TechCrunch.
Certainly, whereas self-hosting offers corporations unbridled management of their knowledge, it additionally comes with upkeep prices and challenges that not all corporations might be keen 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 court docket companies which might be hesitant about leaning on the cloud as a result of safety issues — nonetheless E2EE is fully optionally available, and a few companies would possibly choose to not activate full encryption provided that it limits a number of the issues that customers can do. This contains real-time collaborative modifying on paperwork, whereas it could would possibly hinder integrations with sure third-party companies, amongst different impediments.
“Folks typically need E2EE for the utmost safety, nonetheless, there are a number of explanation why some individuals would possibly select to not decide in for E2EE,” Wang stated. “Customers prioritizing pace and efficiency would possibly decide out of E2EE, [and] the shortage of restoration choices [will mean] that solely the person has the keys to decrypt. A company would possibly [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 person wants and preferences,” Wang stated. “Information is utilized in a neighborhood surroundings, and will be uploaded to the cloud when customers need to back-up or share it. Nevertheless, customers even have the selection to sync constantly.”
Finally, AppFlowy Cloud will even be the corporate’s ticket to monetization, although it’s going to initially be provided utterly without cost.
“We plan to undertake a freemium mannequin for AppFlowy Cloud, which signifies that sure premium options won’t be included within the free tier,” Wang stated. “As these options are nonetheless beneath improvement, there is no such thing as a paywall in the mean time.”
AppFlowy’s cloud platform is offered in personal beta now, with its full public launch touted to return “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.