A group of Chicago tech veterans has launched a startup that aims to help businesses more easily build mobile apps. And after a stint at Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, it's ready to grow its team.
Draftbit, founded in 2018, has built a drag and drop software platform that lets companies build mobile apps in days, rather than weeks or months. The startup is led by CEO Brian Luerssen, who was the managing director of Techstars Chicago from 2015-2017 and the general manager at OKCupidLabs, the innovation arm of Match.com; COO Tim Grace, who was previously the head of product at Trunk Club and VP of e-commerce at the Tie Bar; and other co-founders Peter Piekarczyk and Donald Hruska, two early engineers at Trunk Club and Drivin, respectively.
The startup participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator last year under an earlier iteration of the company, called Orchard. The other YC companies in the cohort were so impressed by how fast the team was able to build the Orchard app, the team realized its strength was actually in mobile app development, Grace explained. The company pivoted at the end of YC, and Draftbit was born.
The startup has raised just under $1 million to date from backers like Sam Yagan's Corazon Capital, Network Ventures, and Jeff Judge, the CTO of Chicago startup Arrive.
Draftbit is currently in private beta, but Grace said the team has worked with both startups and Fortune 500s with app development.
"The Draftbit experience is designed to help product teams build very robust, production-level mobile apps," Grace said. "We're helping both technical and non-technical people build native mobile apps without writing code."
Grace said Draftbit goes beyond simply providing customers with templates to build mobile apps, allowing for more complex designs and functionalities. The long-term goal is to be able to help companies with zero coding know-how build mobile apps with ease.
Draftbit currently has a staff of nine, but Grace said the startup is looking to "aggressively" add engineers to its team.
"In Chicago, I can’t point to that many other companies that are like ours, that are doing what we’re doing, with the team we have," he said.
