Tech in Asia reported on the seed funding announcement from Typedream, which stated that Y Combinator - alongside a series of other investors including WordPress executive Aadil Mamujee and Twitter founding engineer Blaine Cook - had provided an "undisclosed" amount of funding for the no-code website builder.
The firm was founded this year based on its website builder platform, which allows users to "create websites with no coding skills required". Y Combinator has previously provided funding or invested in a number of the best website builders on the market, including Weebly, Webflow, and Strikingly.
Typedream's chief executive Kevin Nicholas Chandra told the news outlet that "we site in the middle between easy-to-use platforms like Squarespace and beautiful-looing but hard-to-use ones like Webflow". He also noted that the new funding would be used to "double down on product expansion".
He had built the company with four friends: Michelle Marcelline, Albert Putra Purnama, Anthony Harris Christian, and Putri Karunia. The four had previously created authentication service Cotter, which allowed users to "log into any platform without punching in their passwords", having previously utilised Y Combinator's incubator program in 2020 to raise funds.
While it generated "decent" revenue, it "failed to achieve the growth rate that they wanted", and Chandra added: "We learned that developers are a very hard audience since they scrutinize every penny they spend on services. On the other hand, enterprise customers take three months to 12 months to convert."
As a result, the four moved into a separate market: for those who are unable to code, but need to be able to create digital products, including influencers, schools, and small business owners. While many have "learned how to use" builders such as WordPress or Wix, Chandra stated, many have also "kept hiring freelancers to build websites" on such platforms.
He noted that they had "found out that no-code users are much easier to convince since they won’t build the services they need by themselves", and so they set up Typedream. The company charges a monthly subscription fee of $15, and Chandra said that he had launched the minimum viable product (MVP) with only three features, but people "were already willing to pay" for the service.
He concluded: "We learned that people are willing to pay for a product that solves their problem with the least amount of technology. We currently support only static websites such as landing pages and personal websites, and we want to expand our use case to commerce."
