Money Is Pouring Into No-Code, and It's Not Slowing Down
Unqork, Starburst, and OneTrust all landed huge rounds this month as VCs bet big on tools that let non-engineers build software.
Check the funding wire this week and you’ll notice a pattern: investors are throwing enormous checks at companies that let people build software without writing much of it. Unqork, an enterprise app builder that’s entirely drag-and-drop, just closed a $258 million round. Starburst Data, which sells a distributed analytics engine you can point at your data without a data-engineering team standing between you and the answer, raised $118 million. And OneTrust, which handles privacy and governance workflows for companies drowning in compliance requirements, pulled in $300 million. That’s the better part of $700 million in a single month for tools built around the idea that the person who understands the business problem shouldn’t need a computer science degree to solve it.
None of this happened in a vacuum. RPA (robotic process automation) has spent the last couple of years convincing enterprises that repetitive, rules-based work can be automated by non-programmers dragging boxes around a canvas instead of writing scripts. “Citizen developer” stopped being a buzzword thrown around at conferences and started being a job title that shows up on LinkedIn. Companies that spent 2020 scrambling to digitize workflows overnight — because their offices were suddenly empty and their customers were suddenly online — didn’t have the luxury of waiting six months for an engineering team to ship a custom solution. They needed something now, and no-code platforms were the fastest path to now.
It’s worth separating the three companies here, because they’re not chasing the same problem. Unqork is the purest expression of the no-code pitch: build entire enterprise applications — insurance claims processing, loan origination, whatever — visually, without touching a line of code. Starburst is a bit different; it’s more about making powerful data infrastructure (built on the open-source Trino/Presto engine) accessible without requiring a small army of data engineers to wire it together. OneTrust sits at the intersection of no-code and a very specific, very lucrative pain point: privacy regulation. GDPR, CCPA, and whatever comes next are forcing every company with a website to prove they know where personal data lives and what happens to it, and OneTrust turns that into configurable workflows instead of custom-built compliance software.
The skeptical read is that this is a bubble inflated by a pandemic-shaped moment — cheap capital, urgent digitization needs, and investors chasing anything that looks like the next Slack. That’s probably partly true. But the underlying shift feels durable: engineering time is expensive and scarce, and the backlog of “things a business wants automated” is basically infinite. No-code doesn’t replace engineers so much as it triages the queue, letting a person in ops or compliance solve their own problem instead of filing a ticket and waiting three sprints. If 2020 taught software companies anything, it’s that the businesses which could route around their own bottlenecks were the ones that survived the year in better shape. Expect this funding pace to continue well into next year.