BUBBLE

Emmanuel Straschnov and Josh Haas started Bubble in New York in 2012 with a simple idea: let anyone build a sophisticated web application without writing code. Haas was the engineer who built the original visual programming engine.

Straschnov, a Harvard Business School graduate, ran the business side.

For years, Bubble was a small team with no outside money. They built quietly while no-code was still a niche hobby, charged small monthly fees and reinvested everything.

The product slowly got more powerful and attracted a dedicated community of builders who called themselves Bubblers. Some of them built real businesses, SaaS companies generating thousands of dollars a month, entirely on Bubble.

That was the proof that mattered. The company did not raise a seed round until 2019.

Bubble charges monthly subscriptions ranging from free (with Bubble branding on the published app) to several hundred dollars a month for professional plans with custom domains, more capacity, and access to advanced features. The platform makes money from the builders, not from the end users of apps built on Bubble.

There is also a plugin marketplace where developers sell extensions that add capabilities to Bubble apps — Bubble takes a cut of those sales. The model is a classic developer-tools subscription play, except the customers are not traditional developers.

The core product is Bubble's visual app builder, a drag-and-drop editor where users design the UI and define the logic of their app without writing code. It includes a built-in database, user authentication, payments and hosting.

The plugin marketplace adds thousands of community-built extensions for maps, email, analytics and third-party APIs. In June 2025 Bubble launched a native mobile builder, so users can build real iOS and Android apps inside Bubble instead of wrapping a web app, and more than 180,000 mobile apps were created in its first months.

It also added an AI app generator and, in October 2025, a Bubble AI Agent that helps build and edit apps.

Bubble grew the way good tools grow: by being genuinely useful to a small group of people who then told everyone they knew. The Bubblers community became a self-reinforcing growth engine — tutorials, templates, forums, and YouTube channels created by users who had built successful businesses on the platform.

Bubble did not need to acquire customers. The customers acquired each other.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated everything. Suddenly there were tens of thousands of people who wanted to build software products but had no technical background and a lot of time.

Bubble was the obvious answer.

Bubble has always had a reputation for being powerful but complex. New users often hit a steep learning curve before they reach competence, which is a real retention problem.

Pricing is the other sore spot. In April 2023 Bubble switched to charging by "workload units", a measure of server usage, and the community revolted.

The announcement thread drew more than 2,000 replies and Straschnov reportedly received death threats. The rise of AI coding tools is the bigger long-term threat.

If a non-developer can describe a web app in plain English and have it generated, the value of a visual builder changes. Bubble is betting that its database, hosting and now its own AI agent keep it essential.

Bubble bootstrapped for about seven years. Its first outside money was a $6.25 million seed round in June 2019, led by SignalFire with Neo, plus angels including the rapper Nas, Lean Startup author Eric Ries and founders of Warby Parker, Allbirds, Okta and Harry's.

In July 2021 it raised a $100 million Series A led by Ryan Hinkle of Insight Partners, a firm that had first approached Bubble back in 2014. The valuation was not disclosed.