Israeli startup Appwrite raises $10m to build open source alternative to Google's firebase

Appwrite, the open source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for web, mobile and flutter developers, announced it has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Flybridge with participation of Ibex Investors and Seedcamp. Individual investors include Uri Boness, the Founder of Elastic and James Lidenbaum, the Founder of Heroku.

Appwrite is a self-hosted solution that offers developers a set of easy-to-integrate REST APIs to manage their core backend needs. Its focus on simplicity, security and performance has resulted in a superior developer experience as evidenced by the project's rapid growth. Appwrite is one of the fastest growing open source projects on GitHub today with over 10,000 stars, more than 30,000 developers joining the Appwrite community in just the last four months and more than 250 code contributors around the globe.

According to industry reports, the global BaaS market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 68.2 percent from 2021 to 2027. Flybridge was the initial investor in Firebase in 2012 and today is turning its attention and dollars to Appwrite. "The backend-as-a-service category is on fire and is poised for disruption," said Chip Hazard, general partner at Flybridge. "We were wowed by Appwrite's compelling developer experience, its vibrant community of open-source developers, and strong adoption, which make it the leading developer of next-generation BaaS platforms."

Founder Eldad Fux started his development career by contributing to open-source software projects. He started Appwrite as a side project focused on simplicity, security, and privacy. Today, Fux embraces the open-source ethos by building an open platform that plays well with other technologies and programming languages while leveraging developers' existing knowledge instead of forcing them to learn new concepts.

Eldad Fux, Founder and CEO, Appwrite: "I started Appwrite to scratch my own itch, but it has quickly become something so much bigger than me. Clearly, many developers were having similar challenges with current backend servers for application development. As software development becomes more complex and repetitive every day, abstraction layers like Appwrite are a necessity. Using Appwrite, we're allowing developers to focus on innovation instead of building common APIs and dev-tools from scratch."

Amit Karp, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners: "Appwrite has built an incredibly engaged open source community with developer love that is palpable. By abstracting the more redundant aspects of application development with a simple, yet flexible plug-and-play solution, Appwrite accelerates application development in a world where time to market is of the essence."

Because Appwrite is designed to be self-hosted, developers can host the service on any cloud provider or infrastructure. Appwrite is focused on security and privacy so developers can own their data and maintain autonomy in their development. Appwrite features include various authentication methods, a realtime database, storage, cloud functions, geo/localization APIs together with a fully featured dashboard and various access controls to ensure privacy and security.

www.appwrite.io