Investment into low-code/no-code platforms has increased five folds

Enterprises increasingly use low-code development practices and tools to help make professional developers and business users more productive. In the near future, there will be a look for vendors, including major cloud providers, to expand low-code's capabilities. Experts predict low-code will improve how businesses not only develop applications but maintain IT overall. Amidst a growing number of companies pouring millions into digital transformation for business resilience, primarily against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms are gaining momentum to cut down lengthy software development cycles to create new applications that meet immediate business needs.

This has resulted in an year-on-year fivefold rise in the venture capital funding into LCNC platforms in 2021, as per GlobalData. Venture Capitals seemingly consider LCNC technologies as part of their core investment strategy backed by the ‘software is eating the world’ phenomenon now more than ever while most companies are still challenged to quickly develop software due to the lack of skilled developers. Advantage of Low-code selects and connects blocks of code to build an application, website or functionality, whereas, No-code development carries this paradigm even further with an entirely drag-and-drop process that requires essentially no coding knowledge.

LCNC vendors claim to address this gap, notably in the enterprise race to digital transformation, by enabling non-IT professionals to develop new applications remarkably fast. Experts say, the focus of VC investors has been on funding high-value LCNC startups that offer enterprise-grade applications to enhance customer journeys, streamline workflows, modernize legacy applications, and support data visualization for increased business productivity.

Over the last four years, digital workflow automation is the most targeted area by VC investors, followed by simpler spreadsheets representation and fast and secure transactional development. As businesses seek extremely efficient working models, digital transformation will become crucial to business survival creating more demand for LCNC platforms. In future, investors will channelize more investments in LCNC platforms with emerging concepts such as micro-SaaS-enabled services, codeless automation, pro-integrated low-code, SAP-Integrated LCNC, and integration platform as a service (iPaaS), among others.

Finally, a big challenge for enterprises to adopt low-code development is that it may create one more layer of shadow IT and the Enterprise-class low-code tools require effort and investment to ensure availability, security, scalability and reliability to meet service-level agreements.