Amid the rise of new AI-powered low-code developer tools aimed at hobbyists and non-technical folks, Uno Platform is doubling down on enterprise developers instead.
Montreal-based Uno Platform offers a suite of enterprise-grade tools for developers to build cross-platform .NET applications that can be supported on Android, Apple, Linux, and Windows systems. Users code an application once and Uno Platform makes it easy to ship other types of applications from the existing codebase.
“If you’re coding something once and it works on five different platforms on desktop, web, and mobile, you’re getting 5x the productivity already,” Uno Platform co-founder and CEO Francois Tanguay told TechCrunch.
Uno Platform is not the only app developer tool platform available, but Tanguay thinks it stands out in a market flooded by vibe coding platforms like Lovable and Cursor. For Tanguay, enterprise developers should have access to productivity tools too.
“Everything we are shipping hasn’t been done before and we like we have a clear road map in terms of how we can add those extra capabilities [to] make everybody 10x faster,” Tanguay said. “Nobody’s capturing that market yet in the enterprise space.”
The 2-year-old startup’s enterprise focus has attracted customers and investors. Uno Platform just raised a C$3.5 million ($2.54 million) seed funding round co-led by AQC Capital and Desjardins Capital, with participation from Scott Hanselman, the vice president of Microsoft’s developer community, in addition to other angel investors.
The capital will help Uno roll out its premium tooling tier, Uno Platform Studio, and new feature, “Hot Design” which allows developers to pause a running application and change its user interface in real time.
From in-house tools to spinout
Tanguay said they wanted to build Uno Platform to be as seamless to use and helpful as working with a consulting agency, which is exactly how the company got started in the first place.
Tanguay founded Nventive in 2008 as a consulting agency to build apps for companies right as apps were becoming the next hot technology. After a few years, Nventive started developing the suite of tools that eventually became Uno Platform because the agency was looking for ways to make itself more efficient, Tanguay said.
Nventive launched Uno Platform as an open source toolbox in 2018. The open source community could help the agency keep up with frequently changing operating systems that were constantly releasing new versions that required Uno Platform to tweak its offerings.
“We have over a hundred million downloads of the platform, something we wouldn’t have been able to do just by ourselves,” Tanguay said. “It was really betting on the open source, as a community, to help grow that initiative and bet that others would see the same value in having access to a toolbox like this.”
Tanguay was right and the company has more than 300 open source contributors. Nventive decided to fully spin out the tool box and created Uno Platform in 2023. Since then, the company has started working with enterprise customers, including Toyota, Microsoft, and TradeZero, among others.
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