You’re a business that wants to create a mobile app, but faster than it would take a designer to build something bespoke. UK-based startup Fliplet says it has come up with a simple way to do this which is mainly used by companies to produce internal business apps, such as to support sales, reporting, training, marketing, stuff like that. Existing customers include Marriott, Mars, Xerox and Sky, and the company counts Samsung, Citrix and AT&T among its partners.
It’s now secured over £500,000 in seed funding from Angels to help it boost sales and marketing efforts in the UK, as enterprise spending on mobile apps takes off. The lead investor is Ben Wynne-Simmons, formerly of 3i and Barclays Private Equity, who is joined by a set of other unnamed investors.
Ian Broom, CEO and Co-Founder of Fliplet, says: “Enterprise apps are today where corporate websites were in the 1990s; seen as a nice-to-have, but not essential. But with smartphone use exploding businesses need to pay attention.”
Fliplet competes with enterprise app development tools tools such as those provided by Appcelerator, Kony, Adobe, Magpus and Pagesuite, but, says Broom, “they are largely targeted at app developers, have long build times and are often expensive.” He says Mobile Roadie and TheAppBuilder – “tend to be limited in terms of design flexibility and backend integration, and less focus on security integration for enterprises and app store deployment.” And mobile enabled web sites wont work offline, while in-house or external teams can be expensive and slow.
Fliplet joins many startups aiming to take advantage of mobile, given that the business and productivity app market is predicted to grow to $58 billion by 2016. Fliplet is going after the rapidly expanding enterprise app market that had over 5 billion downloads in 2014.
