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If Rowy has its way, you can create software if you can use Excel

Development of low- and no-code applications surges forward. Think of Rowy as Airtable on steroids or Excel with steroids and a couple of lines of illicit substances while you listen to our interview with the company’s founder. Of course, low-code solutions aren’t new, but they’re often only viable for low-volume applications until a company outgrows its tools and has to rebuild its technology stack. Rowy has lofty goals; she wants to make her goods available to any advanced Excel user by building scalable software architectures.

An example of the capabilities of modern AI models was demonstrated last week by OpenAI’s Chat GPT. Many people’s eyes have been opened to the potential of AI thanks to the development of large language models and generative AI capabilities. According to Rowy’s co-founder and CEO Harini Janakiraman, “Rowy is going to show the world what AI is capable of when it comes to coding.”

Company representatives explained that their ultimate goal is to develop a platform that can materialise any idea into a digital good. The company’s mantra is “If you can use Excel, then you can use Rowy,” with the aim of encouraging users to put their ideas into action by creating their own businesses and following their hobbies.

“Our aim is to lower the cost, time, and geographic barriers to entrepreneurship, so that anyone, anywhere with an idea can make it real. We are on the cusp of an entrepreneurial renaissance, and I see Rowy playing a huge part in it at scale,” said Janakiraman. “I am personally driven to make software development easier, simple, and accessible for everyone. More people should be building and innovating. Instead of focusing on the core business functionality, there is a lot of valuable developer time that gets wasted on figuring out how to build, deploy, set up DevOps, and on many other complexities in the development process.”

The firm is putting in extra effort to ensure that Rowy can be used even when product demand exceeds supply, which is a significant step beyond simply reducing delivery times.

The Australian firm has finished a $3 million financing round on SAFE notes, spearheaded by investment firm Worklife Ventures (who, notably, are investors in Webflow and WorkOS).

Working remotely has made it possible for me to get capital from highly knowledgeable Silicon Valley investors despite being situated in Sydney, Australia. “Thanks to our investors, we’ve been able to open up a lot of doors for Rowy in the networking world,” adds Janakiraman. “With Brianne Kimmel from Worklife as our lead investor, we found the appropriate partner for us who is aligned with our vision and has funded firms developing contemporary tools for the next generation of creators from the early stages,” the founders said.

With the funds now in the bank, the business can concentrate on making the platform useful for a wider variety of backend templates, providing more comprehensive demonstrations in its sandbox for experimentation, and so on. Anyone interested can browse the available demos, which include examples for OpenAI GPT-3, Google Cloud Vision, a Stable Diffusion to Twitter Bot, and many more.

In addition, we are using Rowy to automatically produce backend code by creating AI-native experiences. According to Janakiraman, “Rowy knows the context of your database and cloud platform, hence the resulting code is more precise.” Moreover, “we have been developing Rowy in open source and have a fantastic community of over 6,000 developers over Github and Discord.”

Janakiraman had a newborn last year in addition to her startup baby, and our chat turned to the challenges of juggling the two.

“Being a mother and a founder has made me way more efficient in how I put my time to use. I have always loved problem-solving and being organized but I think one thing that doesn’t get highlighted is how mothers are naturally amazing at multi-tasking,” she said. “This is something that I have gotten really good at over the last year and is a critical skill for being a founder. This has also made me all the more determined to be building something that creates the highest impact in the lives of builders, makers, and developers – so that they can focus on utilizing their time creating meaningful products.”