Startup of the Day: Deskree, Ukrainian-founded no-code cloud infrastructure tool
Toronto-based Deskree was founded by Dmytro Grechko in 2021 as an internal project of Deskree Studio, aiming to address the struggles in finding a cost-effective and efficient solution for backend infrastructure. The number of Deskree users has grown from 300 to 10,000 developers worldwide over the last year. Most of them are based in North & South America. In 2023, the startup announced a fresh €1.4 million seed round.
In the Startup of the Day column, Dmytro Grerchko, co-founder of Deskree, shares more details about the startup’s idea, its product, and future plans.
The Startup of the Day column on AIN.Capital is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originated from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.
Tell us about your startup. How does it work?
Deskree’s mission is to make backend infrastructure accessible to any development team. We are a low-code platform that helps developers building backend in minutes vs months.
How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?
We used to be a software development agency and Deskree was initially an internal product that we’ve used for ourselves. Later, we realized the scale of opportunity and decided to focus 100% on it.
How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?
The MVP took approximately 8 month to develop.
When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?
We launch our product in closed beta in November 2021, and the public release was made in May 2022. And in January, we are planning to launch our R&D project, which we have been working on for the last six months. I will not go into detail yet, but basically, we have found a way for programmers to earn money from people using their code, wherever they are.
Tell us about the startup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?
We are a B2B SaaS with a subscription model + metered billing per API call. We also offer enterprise cloud engineering program for larger organizations.
We have a free plan and paid plans from $20 to $5,000 per month. The most popular is $70/month. It all depends on what the client needs. When the back-end is built independently, without our help, the project will cost $20,000. The same thing with us will cost $70 per month.
What are your target markets and consumers?
We have users from all over the world, with the biggest mass located in NA, LATAM, and Europe. Deskree is available for both SMEs and large corporations.
If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.
The number of Deskree users has grown from 300 to 10,000 developers worldwide over the last year. Next year,we have grown to more than 10,000 users and are on path to become profitable early next year.
What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.
We are a team of 11. Two of them are Ukrainians living and working in Canada.
Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.
Our startup has received $1.5 million from VC funds like Hustle Fund, Forum Ventures, N49P, FlyerOne, Vesna Capital, and many others as well as angel investors like Vlad Magdalin (Webflow founder).
“We started raising funds at the worst time ever—in November 2021 when we were about out of funds. This time was very stressful. We received our first check from our primary investor, Forum Ventures, on the first day of the full-scale war.”
Dmyro commented the investment.
What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.
Next year we are launching our secret R&D initiative that will help developers and open sources libraries monetize their content, on top of that we are also developing a “virtual CTO” project powered by our internal AI development.
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