cross-platform
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Lilith Games makes time disappear
The Shanghai game maker built a business around progress that continues while you are away. Keeping players happy when they return is the harder part.
TriPlay wanted your music to travel without a passport
A family-photo problem became a bet on media that moves freely between devices. Two decades later, the owner of eMusic is taking that argument from personal collections to music royalties.
Thunkable and the $65,000 app you can build yourself
A designer’s unaffordable quote reveals the wager behind Thunkable: give the person with the problem the tools to build the solution. Native mobile apps, visual blocks and AI prompts make that wager increasingly practical.
FileMaker and the business too awkward for a box
Apple’s software subsidiary, now called Claris, sells the tools to build apps around the way a business actually works. Its most useful lesson starts with a tyre retailer, a failed ERP rollout, and one small repair.
Iru and the hidden cost of one more IT tool
Kandji made its name managing Apple devices. As Iru, it is betting that the expensive part of IT is the work between the tools - and that one shared system can give that time back.
AppMakers USA and the App That Has to Work on Monday
A math game, a plumber’s payroll and a crashing video player reveal what this Los Angeles software shop actually sells: the engineering that starts where the demo ends.
GIMP costs nothing. Keeping it free takes work.
The image editor born at Berkeley still lets anyone retouch, paint and build without a subscription. Behind the free download is a very human operation: volunteer developers, artist patrons and decades of unfinished business.
Automox
Automox is a cloud-native IT automation and endpoint management company that helps organizations patch, configure, and secure Windows, macOS, and Linux devices from a single platform. Founded in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, its agent-based, server-free approach automates patch management and vulnerability remediation across distributed fleets, and its Otto generative-AI assistant lets IT teams build automation scripts (Worklets) in plain language. The company serves more than 1,500 customers across 30-plus countries and has raised roughly $154 million, including a $110 million Series C led by Insight Partners in 2021.
David DeRemer
David DeRemer is the founder and CEO of Very Good Ventures (VGV), the product and venture studio that built the Hamilton app - the first large-scale commercial Flutter app shipped outside of Google. With nearly two decades spanning Accenture, frog design, Chobani, and his mobile agency Posse, DeRemer bet the company on Google's then-pre-alpha Flutter framework and turned VGV into one of the most influential consultancies in the Flutter ecosystem, helping enterprises ship high-quality apps from a single codebase.
FlutterFlow
FlutterFlow is a Mountain View-based visual development platform built on Google's Flutter framework. Two ex-Google engineers built it so designers, founders, and engineers could ship native mobile and web apps without writing the boring parts. Today it has more than 1.3 million users in 200+ countries, around 10,000 paying customers, and an AI layer that turns prompts into pages.
Abel Mengistu
Abel Mengistu is the cofounder and CEO of FlutterFlow, the low-code visual app builder that has enabled over 2 million users to create production-ready Flutter applications without deep coding expertise. A former Google senior software engineer who worked on Google Maps and ATAP hardware, he co-founded FlutterFlow in 2020 with Alex Greaves after a failed restaurant-recommendation startup taught them the real bottleneck was app development complexity. Accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch after applying past the deadline, they famously survived 'No-sleep November' to build FlutterFlow 1.0 in a single month. The company raised a $25.5M Series A from GV (Google Ventures) in January 2024, has grown to 173 employees, and in 2025 launched Dreamflow - an AI-powered builder that generates production-ready app screens in roughly 10 seconds.
Alex Greaves
Alex Greaves is the Co-Founder and CTO of FlutterFlow, a visual low-code/AI-powered app development platform he co-founded in 2020 alongside fellow ex-Googler Abel Mengistu. Built on Google's Flutter framework, FlutterFlow has grown to serve over 2 million users across 200+ countries, backed by $25.5M in Series A funding led by GV and Gradient Ventures at a ~$170M valuation. A Stanford physics and CS grad who honed his craft on Google Maps' machine learning team, Greaves now leads a platform that lets developers and non-developers alike ship native iOS, Android, and web apps in a fraction of traditional development time.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.