Investment Notes: FL0

Blackbird is proud to lead the seed round into FL0 (pronounced “flow”), a startup pioneering a new category in software engineering, “Dev Acceleration” or “Dev Acceleration as a Service” (DAAS). Through its Dev Acceleration platform, FL0 supercharges back-end engineers with the power of coding in a low-code format.

Supercharging Back-end Engineers

FL0 offers a fully hosted solution (including serverless databases and back-end infrastructure) and simple drag and drop interface that allows users to build entirely new products or add-on features for existing products. In addition, the platform has an “app store” marketplace that provides engineers with a suite of third party tools that they can simply pick up and repurpose (or extend through customisations) and rapidly integrate into their tech stack. Over time, FL0 and its developer community will continue to build out the marketplace with additional feature sets, API integrations, and templates for specific functions and applications.

A simple north star - 20x the speed of development

FL0’s mission is to help engineers build applications 20x faster. Backend developers are often a bottleneck for growth. They are in high demand, stretched, expensive and hard to recruit. Enter the value proposition of FL0. By building a platform that takes most of the lower value work away (the writing, maintaining, securing of code) through the delivery of pre designed logic flows, FL0 focuses the attention of developers on higher value work (the design, customizations, and frameworks), increasing the speed of development and making engineering teams more agile. Developers spend less time coding and more time improving how customers use and experience the product.

There are a number of no code / low code solutions on the market, yet most of them are targeted toward front end website development (vs backend application development) and “citizen developers”, designers, and marketers (vs sophisticated backend software developers).

In early customer testing, FL0 has improved development speeds by up to 20x over the current methods.

A team that’s done it before

FL0 is founded by Dale Brett and Rani Adam, who worked together for over four years at Willow, a digital twin product for real estate and infrastructure. Before Willow, Dale founded Tapify in 2016 (a split payments app), which Rani also joined as CTO. They ended up being acquired and merged the team to form Willow. Willow has since grown to over 200 staff. We love the experience of Dale and Rani as well as the broader team they bring with them - an A-team that has worked together with a track record and an acute sense of product and the customer need.

Dale and Rani have put together an incredible team to help bring the FL0 vision to life, and are working closely with passionate engineers and foundation partners who are joining the platform as early adopters.

Atlassian put Australia on the DevOps map, and we are excited to support a company like FL0 enter the fray too. If you’re interested to become an early partner with FL0, or an engineer looking to test the platform, head on over to the website for early access.