Web app builder Divshot raises $1.1M in seed funding

Divshot offers a drag-and-drop builder to make app building quicker and easier

(Updated to reflect comment from Divshot)

Web app builder Divshot has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, it was announced Monday. 

The round was led by Rincon Venture Partners, with participation from investors including 500 Startups, Daher Capital, Floodlight Ventures, Cooley LLP, Drummond Road Capital, and Eric Hammond.

"Divshot’s team has accomplished an incredible amount in a short time. With a compelling vision for the future of web development, I’m very excited to be involved,” Jim Andelman of Rincon Venture Partners said in a statement.

The capital will primarily go towards growing the team to be able to accelerate product development, Michael Bleigh, co-founder and CEO of Divshot, told VatorNews via e-mail.

Divshot is a visual builder for web application interfaces that brings together the simplicity of a drag-and-drop mockup tool with the polish of professional, hand-coded HTML and CSS. The idea is to help professional developers and designers work faster and spend less time on throwaway wireframes and mockups. The apps designed with Divshot work on any device and browser.

The company was founded at Startup Weekend Kansas City in April 2012. It is also a graduate of the Launchpad LA accelerator.

"Divshot is an interface builder for web apps that exports clean, semantic code. The same code a professional would use in the real world. We believe there's a better way to design web apps beyond photo editors, mockup tools and repetitive code," the company says on its website.

"We're building the tool that we've always wished existed."

What separates the services from others like Jetstrap and Easel.io, Bleigh said, is that it is "a general-purpose development tool, where Jetstrap is focused on a single framework and Easel is more of a design aide."

"Our 'development best practices output' approach sets us apart, as does the ability to directly edit the source code of the full page."

Divshot has already amassed more than 40,000 users in less than a year, most of whom are developers.

"Back-end developers have been using Divshot to put together a solid front-end without having to do it all manually and we've also seen uptake from consultancies and agencies who need to put together client work on a quick timeline," Bleigh said.

Divshot was initially based on Bootstrap, the popular open source front-end framework that was developed by Twitter. The company also announced on Monday that it will now be offering support for the ZURB Foundation and Ratchet mobile CSS frameworks as well.

Earlier this month, Divshot debuted Divshot Docs, an open source documentation site for developersm available on code sharing company GitHub.

Divshot docs provides developers with guides that walk through the different aspects of the Divshot interface. Divshot also said that it would eventually bring out step-by-step tutorials, advanced tips and tricks as well.

The company says that it is "devoted to building extraordinary products" and to open sourcing as much as possible along the way. 

"Our philosophy is to take the best practices in modern web development and distill them into powerful, intuitive tools. We have a no compromises approach to code output quality and fully embrace the developer ecosystem from hackathons to open source contributions," Bleigh said. 

 Currently in beta mode, which became open to the public in October, Divshot says that it plans to launch as a paid service later this year. It is currently free to sign up for Divshot’s public beta here.

Check out the video below to see what Divshot is all about:

(Image source: https://www.divshot.com)