Barcelona-based Genie, an open-source startup behind the web framework for the fast-growing Julia programming language, announced that it has raised a €1.1 million pre-seed round led by Speedinvest, with participation from Expa Ventures, Antler, APX/Heartfelt, and Shine Capital. The funds are being used to advance the development of Genie Builder, its no-code web app builder for data science and R&D teams.
Genie empowers data scientists, researchers and engineers to rapidly turn their data analysis code, machine learning models and simulations into shareable web applications. With Genie’s low/no-code web development tools, they can build any kind of data-centric web applications, from analytics dashboards to AI prototypes and products, simulation apps and smart tools, driving business impact faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional software development.
“In today’s enterprise, virtually every department needs to build custom web-based tools and products, including teams in data science and R&D. At Genie, we empower this diverse group of data professionals, engineers, scientists and researchers to share their work easily with web apps and amplify their impact within their organizations,” said Genie’s co-founder Cinzia Palumbo.
Founded in 2021, Genie offers a comprehensive suite of full-code, low-code and no-code tools for web app development specially designed for Julia, a high-performance computing language with over 1 million active users. Its open-source Genie Framework has been downloaded over 90,000 times and has been starred over 2,000 times by developers on GitHub. The framework is widely used by data scientists, researchers, and engineers in computationally demanding industries, such as life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, aerospace, IT consulting, and more.
The company unveiled a no-code tool, Genie Builder, which allows users to quickly create web apps around ML models, simulations, and data analysis code. Genie Builder launched in 2022 and has been accumulating over 2,500 users.
“Genie users are building a wide variety of applications including data exploration dashboards, financial data products, ML/AI, and simulation apps, bioinformatics apps, internal tools and more. With our no-code Genie Builder, they can build these data products in hours, instead of days and weeks, at a fraction of the cost it’d take had they engaged a software development team,” added Adrian Salceanu, co-founder and creator of the Genie Framework.
With Gartner projecting that 70% of new enterprise applications will leverage low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from under 25% in 2020, the market is ripe for growth. Genie plans to use the funds to evolve Genie Builder into a next-gen no-code platform by incorporating generative AI for custom code generation, styling automation, and more. The company also plans to develop Genie Builder into a polyglot platform supporting multiple data science languages including Python, and adding the capability to deploy and run web apps in one-click.
“Genie’s tools streamline the development of custom web apps for data science and R&D teams,” commented Yang Tran, investor at Speedinvest. “The recent inclusion of Julia in the Tiobe top 20 programming languages index underscores the importance of companies like Genie. With their impressive user growth and unwavering dedication to serving the data science and the research and development communities, we are confident in Genie’s ability to make a significant impact on the no-code market.”
