Glide, a no-code service that lets businesses create apps based on Google Sheets, Excel, or Airtable, raises a $20M Series A led by Benchmark
When Glide came out of Y Combinator in 2019, it was looking to help people with absolutely no coding ability to build a simple, but functional mobile app from data in a spreadsheet. Tweets: @dvdsgl , @ycombinator , and @sandykory Tweets: David Siegel / @dvdsgl : TC bringing that late '00s HEAT with the illustration accompanying our article. https://techcrunch.com/... Y Combinator / @ycombinator : Congrats to the team @glideapps on the round! On a mission to create a billion new software developers, Glide (YC W19) enables anyone to create amazing web & mobile apps from Google Sheets, Excel, and Airtable — without having to write any code: https://techcrunch.com/... Sandy Kory / @sandykory : A bottoms-up beauty: “It has seen 500,000 users building a million apps with its platform, and this with organic growth, and just 15 employees so far.” https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Glide's round closes a loop that started with AppSheet, the Seattle no-code platform whose $15M Series A in 2019 validated the spreadsheet-as-app-builder category — and which Google then absorbed into Google Cloud in 2020, per the acquisition that took AppSheet off the independent market. With AppSheet now inside Google, Benchmark's $20M bet positions Glide as the leading independent still building apps directly on Google Sheets, Excel, and Airtable data.
The Y Combinator W19 graduate is part of a broader wave the corpus tracks: Glitch reported 2.5M+ web apps built on its platform, and Dashdash raised $8M from Accel for a similar spreadsheet-like builder — evidence that turning non-programmers into app creators has sustained investor interest across several years and geographies.
First-order effects
- Glide gains $20M led by Benchmark to scale beyond the simple mobile apps it launched with out of YC in 2019, with founder David Siegel framing the mission as creating 'a billion new software developers.'
- The round makes Glide one of the few well-funded independents in spreadsheet-based app building, directly adjacent to Google's now-internal AppSheet.
Second-order effects
- Glide's reliance on Google Sheets as a core data source puts it in a structural bind with Google: the search giant is simultaneously its platform, its data layer, and — via AppSheet — its direct competitor.
- Airtable sits in an ambiguous position as both Glide's data backend and a potential rival builder, meaning the two could shift from symbiosis to competition as both push upmarket.
Third-order effects
- If the AppSheet pattern holds — no-code spreadsheet platforms raising venture rounds, then getting absorbed by cloud incumbents — Glide faces a fork between scaling into an independent platform and becoming an acquisition target, a decision Benchmark's involvement will sharpen.
- The category's trajectory points toward enterprise software fragmenting into tools where business users, not developers, assemble applications, forcing IT buyers to weigh governance against the speed no-code builders offer.
The trend: No-code app builders are maturing from YC-era experiments into venture-backed platforms racing to establish independence before cloud incumbents consolidate the category, as Google's AppSheet acquisition already demonstrated.