I’ve been a technology entrepreneur for the past 15 years in the developer tools space. During these times, I lived in Romania, Switzerland, Singapore and the US. But I’ve been doing business all over the world. That gave me a good excuse to travel, meet people and use technology to create impactful stories.

Plant an App was born from the idea that there is a lot of waste in the software development world, with the same code being written repeatedly. Our suggestion is to lower the entry barrier, so anyone in the organization could build software systems and keep them current. In fact, we picked the name to reflect the idea that software systems are like plants. They would grow organically and adapt to their environment. The best case is they wither and need to be replaced. Or, worse, they become wild and uncontrolled, causing chaos in the organization.

One of the major milestones was to have been accepted in the 500 Startups program in San Francisco. Our objective was to raise our seed round there once the program ended. However, the world had different plans for us, with the pandemic hitting just before the demo day. But this unfortunate event soon turned out to be a massive opportunity for Plant an App, as rapid digital transformation soared. Low-code became one of the few reasonable solutions for businesses that quickly moved their operations in the online world. We rode this wave and grew our revenue from $100K to $800K (€83K to €660K) in ARR in the past 12 months. This resulted in the most recent significant milestone: the successful raising of $1 million (around €825K) through equity crowdfunding campaigns in the US on Republic, and in Romania on SeedBlink.

Plant an App truly shines in two primary use cases – internal tools and customer portals. Retool is one of the new generation low-code platforms that are disrupting the space on the internal tools use case. However, as soon as the internal tool needs to become customer-facing, no new generation low-code can handle it. Having a tool that can handle both of these use cases simultaneously, as Plant an App does, is where we see the world moving. Plant an App has raised almost €1 million investment through equity crowdfunding platforms. On Seedblink, it was the largest crowdfunding campaign in Romania, fully funded in 3 hours. Tell us more about this campaign. What made it so special? What are some of your learnings from it? Many startups raise money to invest in getting international. Plant an App has a unique profile, a Romanian-owned US startup that’s already selling more in the US and the rest of the world than it does in Romania. It makes us a very attractive startup not just in Romania but probably in Europe as well. We also had an equity crowdfunding campaign happening simultaneously in the US, on Republic. co, where we managed to raise significantly less. I think the learning is obvious; it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond, than a small fish in a big pond.

By now, it’s become clear that there will not be a few players owning the entire market. Low-code has become an umbrella term for many various things. Gartner predicts that organizations will use at least 4 different platforms, which have different purposes. However, to be one of those four platforms, specific criteria must be met, such as having a robust development process, playing nice with the many other systems living in the organization, and being low maintenance.

Today, many technologies appear to be independent of each other, such as low-code, RPA, IoT, machine learning, and others. However, it doesn’t take a lot to imagine how these technologies can play together. Therefore, it’s getting more evident that the future of digital transformation is to have systems that leverage several of these technologies to collect data, analyze it, represent it, act on it – and possibly do it all with minimum human intervention.