There is a movement out there to make it easier for people with a good product but who perhaps lack the resources to hire a team to flesh it all out. Kinde is one company that hopes to further this movement.
To realize that vision, Sydney, Australia-based Kinde has raised an A$10.6 million (about US$8 million) seed round. The round is led by Blackbird Ventures. Also participating is Felicis Ventures. And several software leaders have come in as investors and advisors. These include Didier Elzinga (Culture Amp, CEO), Greta Bradman, Benjamin Humphrey (Dovetail, CEO), and Nick Menere (Code Barrel co-founder).
Kinde was founded in December by a team of founders with some blue-chip SaaS experience. For example, Ross Chaldecott, Kinde’s co-founder and CEO, used to be a designer at Atlassian. He later held key product roles at Campaign Monitor and Shopify before launching his startup. Co-founders Dave Berner and Evgeny Komarevtsev also had senior roles at Campaign Monitor as well.
This line from Kinde’s funding announcement pretty well summarizes its mission. “Anyone with an idea, not just engineers, should be able to start a SaaS company. We aim to shorten the distance between having that idea and getting it into the hands of people who need it.”
‘Like Shopify for SaaS’
The company has built a platform that offers an out-of-the-box approach to create all of the costly and time-consuming systems and processes necessary to convert a founder’s dream into reality. Kinde uses the line, “Like Shopify, but for SaaS” to drive the concept home.
The idea is pretty smart. Rather than re-invent the wheel for every startup, why not productize what every company has to create so smaller, less-resourced teams can bring good ideas to market?
“Before someone can start on their product, they have to build essential infrastructure like user management, release management, experimentation, commerce, and billing. These things have nothing to do with their idea but waste their valuable time and money,” Kinde says in its post.
“Our mission is to reinvent the way that software teams get started, with infrastructure that they can start building on top of immediately, which means they can focus on what makes their business unique. This democratizes technology that only established businesses could historically afford and means new founders can accelerate from day one.”
The notion of democratizing the founding of a software company has resonance now. In particular, with the great resignation spawning a new generation of startups, demand for tools to facilitate business formation is likely to be brisk.
And with Kinde, the price is right, for the moment at least. The company, which only recently emerged from stealth, is currently offering its product for free. No doubt this is part of Kinde’s own process of shortening its development curve.
