Blaze, a no-code platform from Blaze .tech that allows customers to build web apps and tools, officially launched on Jan. 12 and has raised a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by Flybridge Capital and MaC Venture Capital.
The round also included participation from investors and unicorn founders in enterprise SaaS including chief executive of Webflow, Vlad Magdalin; co-founder of Branch, Mada Seghete; co-chief executive of CaptivateIQ, Mark Schopmeyer; ACTAI Ventures; Sangha Capital; and Bill Tai.
This funding round that closed at the end of last year will help expand the Century City-based company’s growing customer base, increase the platforms’ integrations, and expand its AI capabilities.
The launch follows a beta phase in which Fortune 500 companies and startups used Blaze to build dashboards, HIPAA-compliant apps, complex workflows, automated invoice generators, and inventory management systems, all without having to write any code.
Because of Blaze’s emphasis on security, the company has become popular with organizations in highly regulated industries such as health care, construction and finance.
“One big priority for us is our enterprise security,” said Nanxi Liu, co-chief executive of Blaze. “We continuously build more upon our enterprise security. We’ve seen in the no-code space that a lot of the tools that are consumer facing, they put cybersecurity on the back burner.”
Blaze’s artificial intelligence-powered platform let’s teams create and launch applications and internal tools. Blaze gives nontechnical people the ability to be entrepreneurial product builders with a drag-and-drop interface and AI system.
“Our users can implement their app’s business logic in just a few clicks because Blaze has done all the work on the technical side to provide a platform that generates intuitive front-ends and secure, scalable back-ends,” Tina Denuit-Wojcik, co-chief executive of Blaze, said in a statement.
Blaze AI is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, the same one used by ChatGPT. App creators can tell Blaze AI to create complex workflows, automatic triggers, custom filters, advanced calculations, and more. Blaze also provides pre-built integrations into Google Sheets, Salesforce and Shopify.
The company generates its revenue via subscriptions. Prices are based on how many features the client wants and how many users visit their apps.
“We want to encourage our clients to make as much money using our platform and building the tools they want, but we don’t take any cut,” Lui said. “We actually have a number of different companies that have built software that they resell to their clients, and they just pay us the subscription fee and they can enjoy all of their revenues.”
This isn’t the first rodeo for Liu and Denuit-Wojcik who have already built and sold one company together. The two women have been working together for over a decade, having founded a digital signage software company called Enplug in 2012, that was then acquired by customer engagement solutions provider Spectrio in 2021.
