[Funding alert] App tools startup BuildPan raises undisclosed seed round from Japanese and Indian investors

App development and testing platform BuildPan has raised a seed round from HNIs in India, Japan, and the US. The Indore-headquartered startup, which helps developers to test, integrate and deploy apps, will use the funds to expand globally, and scale up the team. 

The undisclosed seed round was announced by Sonal Khandelwal, Founder and CFO of BuildPan. 

Sources say that the startup has raised a total of $200,000, Rs 64 lakhs from seed investors and Rs 80 lakhs invested by the founders. 

The process for launching an app right from development to final release is pretty much broken. Between building, testing, deploying, and adapting to feedback from actual users, the process is a hard slog, even for tech giants like Uber, Microsoft, TCS, and Infosys.

BuildPan’s solution makes it easier for app and web builders to innovate faster and cheaper than ever. 

 “The space has lot of innovation to build around,” says Yusho Kawata, partner at Elrise Corporation Inc. Japan, which led the investment for the round along with Sunil Kumar Singhvi and other HNIs. “I felt this platform has potential and its smart AI code analyser will help clients who are not technical to know the quality and tech audit of the code they receive from developers,” he says. 

BuildPan launched in September 2019 and reached $10,000 MRR in just 65 days, aiming to cross $100,000 in FY20. 

Streamlining mobile app development

The app business is huge worldwide. Apple's app revenue accounted for $16 billion in the third quarter of 2019, while the Google Play Store recorded app revenues of close to $11 billion. Combined, both iOS and Google Play generated $27 billion in revenues for Q3 2019, up 37 percent from the previous year. 

Co-Founder Sonal Dandotia worked with some of the biggest enterprises when the idea for BuildPan came to her. She’d seen from the inside how the process of mobile app development wasn’t efficient – and realised, after doing some research, that app development on competing systems wasn’t any better.

“Everyone suffers from the same problem. Ultimately, your ability to engage your end users is the degree to which the app will be successful,” she says.  

BuildPan takes advantage of a cloud backend and an easy-to-use interface that gives developers instant feedback that’s more useful than what was previously available via email, such as highlighted screenshots of apps being used and ‘“instant reply”’ reports that can show a video log of what the user was doing up to 15 seconds before the app crashed. It also tells developers which line of code needs polish.

Sunil Kumar Singhvi, Partner, Singhvi Heritage LLP, says, "We believe that the team at BuildPan has a fantastic SaaS-cum-Enterprise model for the global app developer community. BuildPan helps developers automate the process of continuous code integration and deployment for developing mobile apps using AI, giving out crash reports and various important analytics.”

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)

ALSO READ

[Funding alert] Edtech startup Ruangguru closes $150M Series C round led by General Atlantic and GGV Capital