Madison-based app software company Ionic has raised $6 million in new funding led by the company’s longtime investors Arthur Ventures in Minneapolis, and General Catalyst out of Boston. The startup has now raised $18 million to date.
The new round follows a record-revenue year for Ionic, which the company attributed to its growing B2B division. Company CEO and co-founder Max Lynch told Wisconsin Inno last month the company added more than 130 enterprises to its customer base in 2019, and doubled its business-to-business bottom line.
While Ionic may not be a household name, the company’s open-source framework powers thousands of mobile apps, including at corporations such as Mastercard and Morgan Stanley, and many more geared toward consumers. Ionic’s self-service developer tools are behind more than 10 percent of the apps in the Apple App store and roughly 13 percent of those in the Google Play Store, according to the company.
“We’ve been focused on growing really sustainably. We’re going to be capital efficient.”
Lynch says Ionic’s latest inside round will likely be the company’s last bid for funding as the company nears the break-even point, and fine-tunes its focus on profitability.
“We’re not going to go out and increase our burn rate and hire a bunch more people,” says Lynch. “We’ve been focused on growing really sustainably. We’re going to be capital efficient.”
The new funding will, however, provide enough padding to allow the company to continue developing its B2B products, and explore its R&D initiatives to bring no- and low-code SDKs to market.
“We’re still seeing some good signals there,” Lynch says. “We want to continue to grow quickly, but in a reasonable way. This is definitely a vote of confidence. [Our investors] are excited about what we’re doing and we’re thrilled to have their support.”
