Dublin-based Modulz Raises $4.2M In 5 Days For “No Code” Solution

Modulz, a Dublin-based startup that helps teams code without writing code, has raised a $4.2 million seed round from a crop of international investors. Included among the funders are London’s LocalGlobe, Product Hunt co-founder Ryan Hoover, Weekend Fund’s Vedika Jain and London/Dublin-based Frontline Ventures.

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It took Colm Tuite, the CEO of the company, five days to close the round. Modulz has not officially launched a product, and about 394 people backed it on Kickstarter, he said. 

Modulz’s nine-person team is looking to re-envision workflow between developers and designers by creating a modern design tool. 

“We’re removing the barriers between creativity and code, bringing the power of code to the masses,” Tuite told Crunchbase News. 

“Typically, design teams will draw static representations of their component library, then ‘throw them over the wall’ to their engineering team,” Tuite wrote in a blog post. “As a process, sharing assets between design and engineering teams is conceptually sound. However, existing workflows are disjointed and tooling is relatively archaic.”

Another Future Of Work Startup? 

In his blog post, Tuite wrote that the increase of venture capital money in design tools and workspaces is notable. Overall, as many of us know, there’s never been more startups trying to predict the future of work within Silicon Valley and beyond. Dropbox just had a conference about it, a new fund was born to tackle the space, and Tandem, a Y-Combinator startup looking to tackle workflow, is already valued at over $30 million.

But he wouldn’t deem his company a “future of work startup in the typical sense,” he told me. Instead, he pointed to a cohort of “no code” tools which makes software creation easier for the average person.

Modulz, which started as a $36,000 raise on Kickstarter in November 2017, has now raised two rounds, millions each, within two months of each other (it most recently raised $3 million in July, per its website). 

Tuite also wrote that “progress has been incremental.” 

He pointed to Adobe’s Photoshop, which launched in 1990. About 30 years later, he claims, design software is still using similar tactics to kickstart “inherently interactive components.” 

While no product is out yet, Tuite said the future of work buzz as a whole has led to some notable statistics. About 1,000 teams have signed up for Modulz’s private beta test, and each job listing it posts has garnered an average of 350 job applicants. 

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias