Instanbul headquartered Altogic has raised $1 million in seed funding to help enterprises build and deploy mobile/web applications faster.
Every company today has the ability to build applications for a range of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) use cases. The technologies have evolved continuously, but even with all the novel capabilities in hand, the task of building a production-ready and scalable app remains long, complex, and expensive. Developers have to deal with many complexities on the backend and frontend and often end up delivering their projects late or half-baked — much to the dissatisfaction of their company and its customers.
Altogic automates backend development
To tackle this challenge and improve enterprises’ time to market, Altogic provides a backend-as-a-service platform that handles key tasks associated with the backend infrastructure of an application.
“With Altogic, we provide the set of pre-integrated tools and cloud infrastructure that remove a considerable amount of mundane and repetitive tasks from developers, help them start building products in minutes and deploy them in seconds. Plus, with its no-code capabilities, the solution allows people without a background in programming to develop backend aspects,” Umit Cakmak, the founder and CEO of the platform, told VentureBeat.
The backend of an application includes several elements, starting from the app server, database and cache to business logic, job execution and session management. Altogic handles a majority of these through a three-step process.
“You first define the data model of your application. The data model defines what will be your key data entities in your app database, what kind of data fields will each entity hold, how these data entities will be related to each other, and finally, what will be the validation rules to run on input data before committing them to your app database. Then, you create your application endpoints (e.g., RESTful API endpoint) and link each endpoint with a cloud function (aka service),” Cakmak explained.
In Altogic, endpoints are the communication channels to access the cloud functions of applications and are responsible for exposing application services and data to the outside world. Cloud functions, meanwhile, are defined graphically using nodes, which are the basic service execution units that perform actions on input data and create output.
Once these steps are completed, the developer just has to create their execution environment and deploy the app.
“An environment is a space where your application data is stored and managed and your application’s RESTful endpoints are called. In Altogic, the application designs that you have created in steps one and two are all versioned through snapshots. After creating an environment, you deploy a snapshot of your app to the execution environment. You can have several execution environments (e.g., development, test, production) and deploy different snapshots of your app design to these environments. At this stage, you can integrate your Altogic backend to your frontend app using Altogic’s client API or using any HTTP client library (e.g., axios, fetch),” the CEO added.
Competition
Since launching the platform in beta, Altogic has roped in about 500 developers, both enterprises and freelancers, to build apps using the platform and guide its development. However, they are not the only ones in this space. Google’s Firebase, Amazon’s Amplify and open source alternatives such as Supabase, AppWrite, and Nhost are looking to simplify app development for enterprises.
Cakmak, however, says their product stands out from the crowd as it makes coding optional for developers and gives them a way to develop apps graphically.
“Developers can use built-in or marketplace nodes or even create their own custom nodes and connect these nodes with connectors to define their cloud functions through simple drag & drop operations. This approach brings the best of both worlds, the speed of no-code to quickly develop business logic and integrations and the flexibility of coding to solve complex problems,” he said.
With the fresh round of funding, led by ScaleX Ventures, Altogic plans to grow its engineering team and accelerate product development to make its solution generally available to developers worldwide.
“We will soon release two new products to further enhance the developer experience and add real-time capabilities to the platform so that our users can develop near real-time apps using WebSockets. We will also expand our cloud infrastructure to new regions,” Cakmak said. Globally, the backend-as-a-service space is expected to grow from $1.6 billion in 2020 to nearly $8 billion by 2027.
