Low-code database APITable is another Airtable challenger
Low-code database APITable VS Airtable, Low-code database APITable is another Airtable challenger.
Numerous ambitious entrepreneurs have been drawn to the low-code database market by Airtable’s
enormous $11 billion valuation, which was achieved in late 2021.
They desire even a tiny portion of the American juggernaut’s decade-old pie.
Many customers still expect software to be free, even though SaaS has long been a successful business
model in the US, emerging economies, and even China’s booming tech economy.
Asia’s SaaS firms, created by skilled and reasonably priced engineers, are expanding into the West to
increase the number of their paying clients.
One of these is the low-code database APITable, which has its headquarters in Hong Kong and is currently
establishing a base in Canada.
The business is open about its desire to compete with Airtable. As an illustration, it provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to switch from Airtable to its own platform on its blog (the page disappeared at the time of publishing).
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APITable is vying with a few other burgeoning firms, including Baserow in Amsterdam and NocoDB in San Francisco, to offer an open-source, visual solution for building intelligent, svelte databases.
The emphasis on system compatibility is implied by the name. According to the company’s co-founder and COO Gary Li, customers will soon be able to link the low-code tool to services like Zapier, Slack, Google Workspace, and hot ChatGPT utilizing the APITable API.
The program has a paid, premium edition for consumers who desire an off-the-shelf product that needs little technical know-how and third-party hosting.
APITable has has received about 6,500 “stars” on GitHub, a sign of a project’s popularity among developers.
Li claims that in 2022, “organization users,” including freemium and paid users, increased from 6,000 to over 20,000 across 30 countries, however he refused to provide the company’s income level.
The initial trial run for APITable was conducted in China. In response to the success of cloud-based services like Zoom, Stripe, Canva, Figma, Airtable, and others in the West, venture capitalists rushed to invest in local alternatives, prompting the creation of its Chinese variant Vika in 2019.
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IDG Capital, GL Ventures (Hillhouse’s early-stage arm), and 5Y Capital, which some regard as a bellwether in enterprise IT investing in China, all provided funds to APITable.
As of early 2021, the firm had raised $10 million in total capital, valued at about $75 million.
Vika has had no shortage of challengers back in China. Companies from industry behemoths like ByteDance and Tencent to upstarts like Hipacloud and Treelab competed to develop Airtable rivals.
The parent company will concentrate more on APITable expansion in the West going forward. “Open-source is a marketing strategy for itself. However, Li believes that we still rely on SaaS sales to bring in money.
Kelly Chan, the CEO of APITable, appears to have some experience designing solutions for non-technical people.
Prior to that, he served as CTO at HeyTea, a venture-backed enterprise that transformed the bubble tea industry in China.
The business not only invented the new cheese-on-the-top flavor but also, and this is unusual in the food and beverage industry, heavily invested in a sizable developer staff.
The outcomes provide comfort. HeyTea developed an app under Chan’s direction to speed up ordering, reduce wait times, and increase recurring revenue through a membership program.
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