Airtable right now introduced that it has acquired Dopt, a startup centered on serving to different startups construct product onboarding experiences for brand new customers.
Earlier this yr, Dopt launched various options that helped customers add AI-based help instruments to their respective providers — these are the principle cause Airtable is now buying the corporate. The acquisition closed late final month and Dopt will wind down its service on August 15. The Dopt crew will be part of Airtable’s AI group.
As Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu advised TechCrunch, all of that is a part of his firm’s general strategy to AI. After going by means of a hyper-growth section within the early days of the Covid pandemic, the corporate skilled a little bit of a slowdown, identical to most different startups (although Liu burdened that Airtable at all times continued to develop).
“Talking from my very own vantage level, it felt like an actual form of gear shift,” he advised me. “Prefer it was a special mode. And I believe it additionally form of pushed us to actually concentrate on what’s the technique? What are the massive bets that we wish to make?”
Being resource-constrained, Liu argued, breeds “a sure form of creativity” and forces corporations to be intelligent about how they allocate the sources they do have.
Like so many different startups, Airtable’s present guess is AI. Simply final week, it launched Airtable Cobuilder, which permits its customers to create apps by merely describing them in a Copilot-like chat interface.
“I believe AI, to me, represents two issues actually: one is, it represents a method you could make it even simpler but for individuals to construct software program. Just like the Cobuilder launch – that was about decreasing the ground. We actually did speculate about this again within the day: perhaps, sometime, we will really supply a method for individuals to simply discuss to Airtable and it’ll construct the app for you. We’re actually now right here. I don’t assume I anticipated it to get right here so quick and for it to be so efficient.”
Liu burdened that the Dopt acquisition is primarily about expertise. He appreciated the crew, he stated, but additionally famous that though Dopt solely centered on onboarding, “whenever you do onboarding for not simply your individual firm however for a lot of different corporations, you simply develop a extremely good really feel for learn how to make experiences actually intuitive.” Within Airtable, the Dopt crew will likely be tasked with bringing further AI capabilities to market and growing the person expertise round that.
The 2 corporations didn’t disclose the value of the acquisition. Previous to this exit, Oakland-based Dopt raised a $5.1 million seed spherical in 2022, with Uncommon Ventures, Designer Fund and various angels collaborating.
