Red Foundry raises $1.1M for easy app making

Customers with zero coding experience can create their very own apps with Red Foundry templates

Red Foundry, a startup that helps non-developers build and customize their very own apps, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $1.1 million Series A round from OCA Ventures and the Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (I2A).

Contrary to app-building solutions targeted at engineers with programming experience, like Ansca Mobile or Appcelerator, Red Foundry enables anybody to create elegant iPhone apps without knowing a single line of code. Competitors include iSites and Xyndi.

Clients merely choose a template for their app, customize it with their choice of colors, fonts, photos and text, and add the content that makes sense for their product, like videos, music, menus and more. Integration with outside sites like Facebook or WordPress is all included. After everything’s said and done, Red Foundry also throws in analytics and (if the client actually does want to get into the programming) full customizability.

Red Foundry is free to try until the customer decides to actually release an app, at which point there are multiple price points to choose from. The $59 per month Silver plan costs the client a one-time $99 publishing fee and 20% of the app’s revenue. Similarly, the $99 per month Gold plan costs a $995 publishing fee and 5% of the app’s revenue. The $199 per month Platinum plan charges a $1,999 publishing fee but the client keeps 100% of their revenue. For the enterprise, Red Foundry doesn’t disclose price points.

The startup has really only started moving in the past couple months and the new website just launched two weeks ago. Last week, beta invites started trickling out.

All three of Red Foundry’s founders, CEO Jim Heising, CTO Ron Franczyk and Chief Software Architect Andrew Newman, first met success when Franczyk and Newman’s anti-spyware company, called GIANT company software, was acquired by Microsoft in 2004. The product they developed at GIANT eventually became the basis of Windows Defender in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

When Heising started creating apps for clients like Pearl Jam and Kodak, he realized that there was a huge untapped market: everyone wants an app but not everyone can code. Thus, Red Foundry was born.

Today, Red Foundry has offices in Seattle, Chicago and New York and the company is currently looking for an Android developer (so they can expand beyond the iOS platform) and a customer support manager.