Locofy, a Singapore-based startup that creates a low-code platform for converting designs to code, has raised $3 million in pre-seed investment.
The fundraising round included participation from Accel, January Capital, Golden-Gate Ventures, Boldcap, and a number of angel investors and advisers (including the founders of Ola, Wego, GajiGesa, Hasura, Holistics, 1bStories, and Ohmyhome, to name a few).
“We will also be building more frameworks such as React Native, Flutter, Vue, and other design tools such as Sketch and Adobe,” he continued.
The Locofy platform was created to address the worldwide IT skills shortage, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic. The platform promises to tackle the problem by turning designs to code and assisting engineers with their day-to-day tasks. They want to do this by automating 50% or more of their present workflow and freeing up time to focus on other things.
Locofy’s Figma to React conversion platform is currently in beta, and early access registrations for React Native, Flutter, and additional Web and App frameworks are accessible. The firm is totally remote, with its founders and incorporation in Singapore, and is run by a crew of ten.
Mittal (previously Chief Product Officer at Homage, Finaccel, and Wego) and Sohaib Muhammad (former technical head/lead at Homage, Wego, Gumi, and featured at Google IO) co-founded Locofy in 2021 after working together for at least eight years.
“The idea came from our own needs, with the never-ending pressure to build world-class products and launch them fast with lean teams. For close to a decade, we just weren’t happy with the status quo and knew our frustrations were shared by other engineers and builders,” said Mittal.
“The shortage of good engineers and rising costs were also an important factor in us deciding that we wanted to solve this global problem our own way, focusing on our strengths. After building two Google Play Editor’s Choice Apps & one of the world’s first and fastest travel mobile websites together, we decided to build a platform to allow lean teams to build high performance and scalable products, keeping quality of code at the centre of everything.”
Locofy moved from raising an angel investment round to registering the firm in one weekend in 2021, according to the co-founder, followed by the introduction of its v1.0 and the conclusion of the pre-seed funding round.
It wants to release its mobile solution (React Native, Flutter), implement Drag and Drop of components from popular libraries and bespoke design systems, and develop AI-based solutions like auto-tag and auto-layout.
“We would like to come out of beta for both web and mobile platforms this year and grow the community globally! We want to automate more than 20 million lines of code this year,” Mittal closes.
Low-code platforms have grown in popularity as a result of their potential to reduce engineers’ burden and make the product development process more frictionless. Its advantages, according to Forbes, are agility and cost structure. Low-code developers are expected to account for approximately 60% of all part-time developers and around one-third of full-time developers by 2025.
