The app builder that started with a deceptively small idea - paste in a spreadsheet, get an app - and grew into an AI platform aiming to make software creation a job anyone can do.
Somewhere right now, a warehouse manager who has never written a line of code is opening an app she built herself last Tuesday. It tracks inventory, pings a supplier when stock runs low, and lives on her phone. She made it out of a spreadsheet she already had. The tool that let her do it is called Glide, and this is the whole point of the company: software, built by the person who actually needs it.
That is who Glide is now - not a clever demo, but the plumbing behind a few million small acts of software-making. The company sells the radical notion that the people closest to a problem should be the ones building the fix, even if they think "API" is a typo.
For most of computing history, building an app required a developer, a budget, and patience. The person with the problem filed a ticket. The person with the skills had a backlog. In between sat a gap measured in weeks, sometimes quarters - and an enormous pile of work that simply never got built because it was too small to justify an engineer and too important to ignore.
The market's answer had always been "hire more engineers," which is a bit like answering a housing shortage by suggesting everyone become an architect. Glide's founders looked at the same gap and saw something else: most business software is, underneath, a list of things and a few actions you take on them. A spreadsheet, in other words. And nearly everyone already has spreadsheets.
Glide was founded in 2018 by David Siegel, Jason Smith, Mark Probst, and Antonio Garcia Aprea. The four had worked together at Xamarin, the developer-tools company Microsoft acquired for a reported $500 million in 2016, after which they spent a couple of years inside Microsoft watching how software actually gets made at scale.
It is a small irony worth savoring: a team whose entire careers had been spent making tools for developers came away convinced the next big opportunity was making tools for everyone else. They took the idea to Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, raised a seed round of roughly $3.6 million led by First Round Capital, and shipped a product with a one-sentence pitch - turn your spreadsheet into an app - that was easy to dismiss and hard to forget.
Most business apps are a list plus a few actions. Everyone already owns the list. It's called a spreadsheet.
Four ex-Xamarin engineers who built tools for developers, then bet against needing them.
Y Combinator W19, a $3.6M seed from First Round, and a pitch you could fit on a napkin.
When the pandemic sent the world looking for fast, cheap, custom software, the napkin pitch suddenly read like a forecast. Restaurants needed ordering apps. Clinics needed intake forms. Nonprofits needed to coordinate volunteers. None of them had a quarter to wait. In April 2022, Benchmark - the firm behind Uber, Dropbox, eBay, and Docker - led a $20 million Series A, bringing Glide's total raised to roughly $23.7 million and putting partner Miles Grimshaw on the board.
At its core, Glide reads data - from Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, or its own built-in database - and produces a working app for phone, tablet, and web. You arrange screens by dragging, not coding. Change the data and the app updates. It is the kind of thing that looks obvious in hindsight and took a great deal of engineering to make feel effortless.
Then, in 2023, the ground shifted under the entire no-code category, and Glide leaned into it rather than away. Here is what you can actually do with it today:
Build mobile and web apps from your data with drag-and-drop screens. No app store gatekeepers, no developer queue.
A built-in, spreadsheet-style database with live updates - so your app and your data finally agree.
Generate apps and have AI read documents, text, and images - one of the fastest-growing parts of the platform.
Put AI to work on real tasks: drafting emails, screening resumes, processing invoices, managing contracts.
Automate with triggers, conditions, loops, and human-in-the-loop steps. Reached general availability in January 2025.
Describe the app you want in plain language and watch Glide assemble it. The 2019 pitch, finally automated.
Four ex-Xamarin engineers - Siegel, Smith, Probst, Garcia Aprea - start Glide in San Francisco.
Public launch out of YC and roughly $3.6M led by First Round Capital, with SV Angel and YC.
Total funding reaches ~$23.7M. At announcement: 500K+ users and 1M+ apps and pages created.
A live demo led by the CEO marks Glide's turn from no-code builder to AI-powered platform.
Inspections, Resume Screener, Invoice Processing, and Contract Manager arrive; automation opens in beta.
Automation hits general availability; plain-language app generation, multiplayer, backups, and Team SSO ship.
A spreadsheet-to-app tool has quietly become an AI automation platform used around the world.
The skeptic's question about any no-code tool is fair: does anyone serious actually use it? Glide's answer is a mix of household-name companies and an enormous long tail of individual makers. Teams at Hunter Douglas, Volkswagen, Costco, and Coca-Cola are among the logos Glide cites on its own home page - not as flagship products, but as internal tools built by employees who needed them.
The scale that matters most isn't revenue or headcount. It's the count of apps that simply would not have been built any other way.
Bars scaled for comparison, not to a single axis. User and app figures reported at the 2022 Series A; countries figure from 2025. Approximate.
There is a clean economic story underneath the chart, too. Glide cites a customer who saved more than $100,000 a year by replacing manual processes with two apps - the sort of math that turns a curiosity into a line item finance approves. A growing ecosystem of certified "Glide Experts" now builds for companies that want the outcome without the learning curve, and that channel drives a meaningful slice of revenue.
Plenty of companies sell software. Glide is unusual in that it sells the ability to make software, and it is unusually explicit about the target: a billion new creators. It's an audacious number, and the company knows it. But the framing matters, because it explains every product decision. Glide isn't trying to out-feature professional developer tools. It's trying to delete the gap between having a problem and shipping a fix.
That ambition is why the AI pivot reads less like a trend-chase and more like the original plan arriving on schedule. When the founders said in 2019 that everyone would build software, they needed a technology that could meet a non-technical person halfway. Generative AI is that technology. Describe what you want; get something that works. The spreadsheet was the on-ramp. AI is the accelerator.
Glide doesn't have the field to itself. Bubble courts people building complex web apps; Airtable owns the database-as-app crowd; Softr, Adalo, and Noloco each carve off a slice. The category is crowded precisely because the underlying bet - that the next generation of software gets built by people who aren't engineers - is looking less like a gamble every year.
What sets Glide apart is the on-ramp. Other tools ask you to learn their world. Glide meets you in a spreadsheet you already understand and, increasingly, in plain English. If that sounds like a small advantage, remember that the history of personal computing is mostly a history of small advantages in ease-of-use compounding into enormous shifts in who gets to participate.
Which brings us back to the warehouse manager. A few years ago her inventory problem would have become a ticket, then a backlog item, then - most likely - a thing she just lived with. Now it's an app she built herself, running on her phone, doing exactly what she needs. Glide didn't write her software. It did something stranger and more durable: it made her the developer. Multiply that by a few million, aim it at a billion, and you start to see what the company is actually building. Not apps. App-makers.
Figures and dates compiled from public sources including Glide's own announcements, TechCrunch, Crunchbase, PitchBook, and Built In. User, app, revenue, and headcount numbers are reported snapshots and approximate; some third-party estimates vary. Where sources conflict, the more conservative or officially-stated figure is used.