Two IPOs have caught the eyes of investors recently, both debuting in the last few months and currently outperforming their initial share price: Squarespace ($SQSP) and Monday.com ($MNDY).
Squarespace made its New York Stock Exchange debut in mid-May, ending its first day at $43.65 per share. By EOD July 2, it was sitting at $57.01. Monday.com has done even better: since its debut three weeks ago, the productivity service’s share price has increased 28.15%, settling at $229.23 per share as of July 2. Monday’s IPO made its CEO Roy Mann’s six million shares worth nearly $800 million dollars. By now, he’s flown well past the billion marker.
These two companies haven’t succeeded in isolation — they’re part of the SaaS surge that’s dominated tech over the last two years, and even more specifically, part of the surge of no-code startups.
No-code startups or services are, for the most part, services that allow users to customize, build or modify things digitally with no coding experience. More often than not, that means building and modifying websites — Wix.com, Squarespace, WebFlow and Pantheon all offer site-building services — but can also mean things like workflows, as in Monday.com’s case, or things like storefronts and apps, as in Figma’s case. Those six startups alone are only a handful in the space, and have raised a collective $1.518 billion in funding. No-code products are starting to seep into other industries as well, like video game development and education software.
That funding and demand has allowed these companies to balloon in size. Over the last two years, the number of job listings at those six companies have increased anywhere from 25% to 227%, with Figma seeing the greatest growth but Wix.com leading the pack with 316 open listings, according to Thinknum data. Webflow saw a significant job listing increase at the start of the year off the back of a $140 million Series B led by Accel and Silversmith Capital Partners.
This spring saw the IPO of both Monday.com and Squarespace, but more are likely to be on the way. Headcount at no-code startups is growing as rapidly as the money is coming in — especially for still-private companies like Figma and Webflow, which have increased headcount 265% and 187% respectively over the last two years. These companies have become major industry forces on their own, competing with public companies like Adobe — which itself has a much higher learning curve than many no-code services — and eyeing acquisitions.
The amount of money flowing into these companies’ coffers can’t even be properly described as a “flow” — it’s a deluge. Just last week, Figma announced a new $200 million funding round valuing their company at $10 billion. No-code services have benefited greatly from the pandemic, which has forced businesses and individuals to adapt to the inevitable digital shift at a rapid pace. Coding may have fully replaced cursive lessons in classrooms across the country — teaching code to children has become a lucrative business in and of itself — but the majority of the U.S. population still lacks any coding knowledge.
In a world where the economy and job market exists more and more online, services like these that allow people to build a digital presence without proper coding experience have an advantage, and investors are willing to fork over mountains of cash to get in on the action.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
