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A startup looking to democratize data in the enterprise? That might sound familiar, but DirectX, which today announced a $7 million series round led by True Ventures, is taking a different approach to most of its competitors by combining traditional developer tools with a no-code approach. An open source data platform for enterprise users. Using the service’s tools, developers can easily convert any SQL database into an API to power their applications – or use the service’s no-code tools.
Although it only launched in 2020, the New York-based remote-first company has added enterprises like Bose, Adobe and Tripadvisor to its roster of clients. And while the company itself is only two years old, DirectX’s CEO and founder, Ben Hein, founded it in 2011 after leaving the Air Force to start a web consulting business. In 2004, they started playing with the ideas that led to the launch of DirecTV.
Image Credits: straight ahead
“What I’ve identified is that there’s a lot of redundancy in engineering — authentication and authorization, connectivity, database, data access, caching,” Haynes explains. “That’s all there is to building the deliverable, but once you deliver it, you need a way to manage it.”
Back then, that usually involved a CMS like WordPress or a LAMP stack like phpMyAdmin, maybe Drupal and database management tools. But there weren’t any great tools for building information architectures for new projects, so Haynes himself ended up coding the first versions of what would become DirectX. And while it worked as a side project during his time at SoulCyle and AOL, it became a full-time job and startup in 2020 when he and his co-founder Rijk van Zanten started getting more serious requests for the tool. Previously, they were only used in their consulting work. Today’s Direct is obviously no longer a PHP application. Completely rewritten and built on a modern Jamstack platform.
Director co-founders Ben Haynes (l.) and Rijk van Zanten (r.)
Perhaps the best way to describe the DirectX user experience today is a mix of a code-centric database management tool and the service’s AirTable-like DirectX Studio no-code tool.
As Haynes stressed, the company is not in the business of managing the databases itself. Instead, it can be stored on any SQL database. “The database is not part of our platform,” he said. “That’s your data. You have control. We do it on a database manager management tool. We try to provide tools and access to your planning, optimization, foreign key constraints. We don’t connect any of our system data. If you delete our software after six months or six years, it’s completely clean.”
And while business users can use the service, the main audience – even for a no-code / low-code tool, are developers. “We’re just focusing on the developer as our best customer profile. We’re talking and working with developers,” Haynes said. Services like Retool or Airtable are no-code platforms first, then try to fill in the technology, he argued. “You end up with a band aid — maybe where developers need to scale.” A stop-gap solution that you’ll never be happy with,” he said. We’re database first, API second, connectivity second, and no-code second.
This developer focus is exemplified by the fact that the service provides REST and GraphQL APIs to interact with the service via a command-line interface and JavaScript SDK.
Image Credits: straight ahead
For developers, this means they get a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the tool and use their data (whether it’s text, image or geographic data). The tool is available as an open source and freemium fully managed service with paid tiers starting at $25 per month.
The company now has 25 employees and has raised a total of $8.5 million. In addition to True Ventures leading this Series A round, Handshake Ventures also participated.
“Empowering non-technical users without coding tools is a game changer in the corporate world,” said Phil Black, co-founder of True Ventures. straight ahead board of directors. “straight ahead It is an open source project that has been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. Among many benefits, the software helps teams of developers significantly reduce the hours they spend creating data-driven projects. What’s more, we love how much time the founding team spent on this problem before launch straight ahead. Hand-to-hand combat breeds creativity.
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