Barely three years after funds poured into low-code development in 2009, the sector has hit a snag, with one of its poster boys now biting the dust
ByteDance-backed low-code developer Hipacloud announced on March 21 that it will shut down at the end of May, with the founder due to join ByteDance.
The company announced that it will stop providing services and maintenance of its website, Jiemian News reported.
Jiemian learned from people familiar with the matter that Hipacloud’s founder Chen Jinzhou will join ByteDance, and his team has been disbanded.
Low-code is a visual approach to software development that optimizes the entire development process to accelerate delivery
“After Chen joined ByteDance, he will report directly to Xie Xin, Vice President of ByteDance, who is in charge of the business of Feishu (Chinese: 飞书),” media reported. Feishu is a mobile workplace app.
According to Hipacloud’s announcement on March 21, its team said that user data will remain accessible until May 31, 2022. Customers whose packages have not expired by March 31 can apply for a refund or relocate their data to Mingdao (Chinese: 明道云), Feishu, and other office cloud service providers before April 8.
Starting from June 1, HipaCloud will delete all the data stored on its servers, including business data, attachments, comments, and shut down all servers. After that,users will no longer be able to access its service.
Founded in 2019 in central China’s Wuhan, Hipacloud is a low-code developer who supplies online form design and data collection tools,.
In July 2021, Hipacloud announced that it had completed a Series A round of financing from ByteDance worth tens of millions of yuan. Since July 2019, Hipacloud has received four rounds of financing, including seed round, angel round, pre-A and series A rounds. The investors include ByteDance, InCapital and Chuxin Capital. But at the beginning of 2022, the corporate venture arm of ByteDance bowed out as a shareholder of Hipacloud for unknown reasons.
The boom in China’s low-code development began after 2019, with developers securing large financing deals one after another since then. Meanwhile, the capacity gap between developers is getting smaller.
HipaCloud faces stiff competition from industry giants such as Tencent Document, Shimo (Chinese: 石墨文档), DingTalk Document (Chinese: 钉钉文档) and Feishu Forms (Chinese: 飞书表格).
The demise of Hipacloud marks the beginning of a round of shakeup and consolidation in the low-code industry, according to Jiemian.