Vista Equity Partners will buy a majority stake in Quick Base Inc., a software company that provides people with no coding experience the tools to build internal software platforms.
Vista will acquire the stake from Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe for over $1B, while the latter will keep a minority stake.
Slow and steady for Quick Base
Founded in 1999, Quick Base was one of the 3 business units sold by software maker Intuit back in 2016, along with software units Demandforce and Quicken.
According to the WSJ, the total sale was likely worth about $500m at the time (meaning Quick Base alone was worth even less).
But since then, coding for the layman has taken off: Quick Base has upped its annual revenue by at least 20% to more than $125m, and bagged high-profile customers like Southwest Airlines, Google, and Sprint.
The rise of coding for dummies
Over the last few years, DIY-coding platforms like Google’s App Maker program and Microsoft’s PowerApps have gained popularity.
Now, Quick Base joins its competitor Airtable in the unicorn coding software club. (Like Quick Base, Airtable saw its revenue increase 400% in 2018 with a total of 80k companies now using the company’s software.)
