Series A Rounds continue to soar as Bubble.io raises $100M led by Insight Partners

It’s no secret that both Seed and Series A rounds have grown a lot over the years, gone are the days of $750k Seed Rounds, $4M is now the norm and for Series A $13M is where most land (Source – Wing.vc). At the same time, we’re moving into a time where outliers are becoming more like inliers as companies tackle huge markets and with them capture massive rounds from VC firms flush with cash and ready to bet on the next big thing.

Of course, sometimes companies just go big, really big, in their Series A round, as is the case with Bubble.io which announced an $100M round led by legendary VC firm Insight Partners. Whenever I see a huge Series A round like this, I know there’s probably a pretty interesting backstory behind it, and this one doesn’t disappoint.

Bubble.io

Josh Haas, the founder of Bubble.io started the company and for the first seven years bootstrapped it, raising no outside funding and just focusing on building a great product. Then in 2019, Josh raised a $6.5M Seed round, which by current standard’s isn’t too crazy, and once again, went back to building and growing the product. Insight Partners, a well known VC firm in New York tried to get into Bubble.io back in 2014, and well, this year they got there way to the tune of $100M.

As the platform matured, it happened to nail the timing of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, which saw people scrambling for new skills and improving their prospects amid a gloomy job market. Straschnov says that Bubble saw an immediate bump in usage in March and April 2020, and the company has tripled revenue over the past 12 months.

Bubble’s focus for the past eight years has been on helping people turn their ideas into startups. The company’s proposition is that a large number of even venture-backed companies could be built using Bubble without the expense of a large engineering team writing code from scratch.

Unlike other no-code tools, which focus on building internal corporate apps, Straschnov says that the company remains as focused today on these new companies as it has always been. “[We’re] not trying to move upmarket just yet — we are trying to do the same thing that AWS and Stripe did five years ago,” he said. Instead of trying to dominate the enterprise, Bubble wants to grow with its nascent customers as they expand in scale.(Source – TechCrunch)

Of course I couldn’t help but take a look at Bubble.com and as you might expect, it currently forwards to Bubble.io so somewhere along the company snagged the .COM, I’m guessing one of my readers knows more and will likely share in the comments.

What I like so much about the Bubble story is how focused the founder has always been on building a great product. Bootstrapping for seven years before raising money is no easy task. Then, an even harder move is realizing when you might have a billion dollar business on your hands which often means moving out of bootstrap mode and into the VC world where billion dollar dreams come true.

I think there are plenty of people out there who would be fine running a nice multi-million dollar business and would happily continue bootstrapping forever. At the same time, as a founder myself, I love watching people really go for it and shoot for the moon, in this case, it looks like Josh might just get there.

Congrats to Josh and the whole team, there’s no doubt things are going to get a lot more exciting from here! 🚀

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton