Member Article

London app developer Fliplet secures £500k seed funding

Fliplet, a mobile app builder for enterprises , has secured over £500k in seed funding to help it boost sales and marketing efforts in the UK, as enterprise spending on mobile apps takes off.

The lead investor is Ben Wynne-Simmons, formerly of 3i and Barclays Private Equity who is joined by a strong set of investors from marketing, finance, media and IT backgrounds.

Launched in 2013, London-based Fliplet allows people from a non-technical background to easily create and share their own apps securely, for a fraction of the time and cost it takes a designer to build a bespoke app.

Fliplet is primarily used by companies to produce internal business apps; typically these apps drive productivity by supporting sales, reporting, training, marketing, lead capture and HR.

Existing customers include Marriott, Mars, Xerox and Sky, and the company counts Samsung, Citrix and AT&T among its partners.

According to research, in 2013 the business and productivity app market was worth $28 billion and is predicted to grow to $58 billion by 2016. Fliplet is going after the rapidly expanding enterprise app market that had over 5 billion downloads in 2014.

Ian Broom, CEO and Co-Founder of Fliplet said: “Enterprise apps are today where corporate websites were in the 1990s; seen as a nice-to-have, but not essential. But with smartphone use expected to hit 6 billion devices by 2020, businesses need to start paying attention to the shift in how their teams, customers and suppliers want to communicate and collaborate.

“Interestingly, 75% of the apps currently created with Fliplet are for internal use or limited distribution.

“Fliplet breaks down technology barriers, helping businesses to create apps that reduce cost or drive strong return on investment. Our goal is to democratise the production of apps so that anyone can do it, not just those who know how to code.”

According to Ben Wynne-Simmons, investor: “Fliplet is offering an innovative product that is very much of its time. This is a team that is approaching the way people work with a ‘mobile first’ mentality, and with mobile-native millennials as the greatest incoming wave to the workforce the timing couldn’t be better.

“The best businesses are already equipping for this change and the others risk losing out if they don’t. Fliplet is also challenging conventional business models. It democratises development, allowing for innovation to bubble up from employees rapidly building multiple apps – charging per user rather than per app. It’s similar to powerpoint. The cost for businesses to trial multiple ideas quickly is low which makes it easy to adopt and to modify apps for changing needs. Together, this makes for a very compelling proposition for any business.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ellen Forster .