EQT Ventures has led a USD 12.7 million Series A round into Amsterdam-based development startup CodeSandbox, which is used by the likes of Stripe and Shopify, from its AI platform Motherbrain.
Other participants in the round include existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Arches Capital, as well as angel investor Guillermo Rauch. They were also joined by two new angels – Andreas Blixt and Daniel Gebler.
Founded in 2017 by former Facebook developer Ives van Hoorne (CEO) and industrial designer Bas Buursma (COO),CodeSandbox enables teams to prototype, build and host web applications via its web development platform.
The duo set out to solve the slow, fragmented process of building and sharing web apps – one of the most significant web development issues, in their view. They recognised that developer environments are getting more complex and slowing teams down, according to the two founders.
“We’re creating the best tool for product teams to collaborate and build web apps quickly,” said Ives van Hoorne, CEO and co-founder at CodeSandbox. “Rather than trying to take a local development environment and simply put it in the Cloud, we’re building a web-first offering that’s faster, more collaborative, and easier to use. At Facebook, we used FBFiddle — the company’s prototyping tool for code that was built directly into its development workflow. However, most companies don’t have the resources to create such custom tooling.”
CodeSandbox will use the capital to launch its product Pro Workspaces, and scale its remote-first development team. “With the launch of Pro Workspaces, we’re giving developers and product teams of all sizes a purpose-built platform to collaborate on code — either to get feedback or code together on ideas,” commented van Hoorne.
The Netherlands-based CEO added: “It hooks right into companies’ component libraries or design systems, so they can prototype, review, and iterate on ideas faster than ever. We’re thrilled to welcome EQT Ventures to our roster of backers.”
