Hazard Lights

Leading-edge software developers are amazing – yet incredibly demanding – early adopters.  For products and platforms that increase development velocity, remove complexity, and drive performance and scalability, their initial support is a leading indicator of future success.  Companies that channel this early support into creating a passionate, engaged, developer community build better products, see stronger adoption, and ultimately build better businesses than their non-community-driven peers.  This is an important investment theme for Flybridge and one we have seen play out successfully with our prior investments in companies such as MongoDB, which is now a $30+B value public company whose industry-leading database has been downloaded over 200 million times from their website, and Firebase, which now has more than 3 million apps using its services and in which we were seed and Series A investors prior to their acquisition by Google in 2014.  

Fast forward to 2021 and one of the fastest-growing developer communities is forming around Appwrite.  Initially developed by Founder and CEO, Eldad Fux, as a passion project to solve his own problems (as all the best developer platforms are), the Appwrite community has exploded in the last 9 months growing to over 50K members and over 375 code contributors across the globe.  Developers love the platform, which now has over 13,000 Github stars, making it one of the fastest-growing repos on Github, and usage is up 24 times in the last 6 months.  The passion for and engagement with Appwrite can be seen in their most recent release, where open source contributors outnumbered maintainers and over 100 community-driven pull requests were merged into the main branch.  

Appwrite is a secure open-source backend server for web, mobile & flutter developers, that is often referred to as an open-source version of Firebase.  Google has been an excellent steward of Firebase, but nearly 10 years after its initial release which enabled real-time applications, and after integrating several acquisitions, we and the Appwrite community believe there is an opportunity to create the leading backend service for the next 10 years.  

Specifically, Appwrite was written from the ground up to be the best backend as a service on the market, with consistently designed services that drive a better developer experience and APIs that are designed to work well as a whole, yet with the flexibility to be consumed separately.  All the protocols are ones that developers already know, which shortens the learning curve and the time to wow.  Finally, in today’s multi-cloud, privacy-aware, and security-focused world, Appwrite can be hosted on any infrastructure, location, and platform which allows application developers to control their data, users’ privacy, and comply with local regulations.

Given this success, we were thrilled to co-lead the company’s recently announced $10M Seed round alongside Bessemer, Ibex Investors, and Seedcamp.  The resources will be used to expand the team (careers page here) and drive the roadmap, including releasing Appwrite 1.0 and the Appwrite Cloud service as well as deepening the platform’s database, storage, authentication, and functions services, all while being responsive to new ideas brought forward from this incredible community.  We look forward to the journey!