Airtable quietly acquired Walrus.ai, a no-code software testing platform, earlier this year.
It may be overstated, though. Airtable tells me that Walrus.ai has no plans to use any of the service's technology, and that Walrus.ai's homepage became unavailable a few months ago. Airtable's Chief Product Officer Peter Deng and Walrus co-founder Scott White were not ready to use the term Acquihire.
White told me that at the end of the day, you want to work on things that align with the vision and the arcs of what you are trying to accomplish. Airtable is the opportunity to fulfill the vision of what you set out to accomplish on a grander scale. I think it is an evolution of what we are working on, to be able to take that to the next level. I think it was a great opportunity.
White will become the product lead for solutions at Airtable, Nathan an engineering manager in the company's enterprise organization, and Marsh a software engineer, as well as joining the company. The co-founders are joining the company. Walrus.ai raised $4 million from investors.
Two companies say their vision was very much aligned. Airtable wants to turn all of its users into app developers by helping them write their tests in plain English.
Walrus.ai has a pitch for companies.
Deng said that democratizing software creation made it easy to build software. It was immediately apparent that we share the same vision when I met Scott and the Walrus team. Walrus wanted to make it easy for developers to build high-quality software. When we started talking, I wanted to make it easier for everyone to build software. Right? How about that? I think there was immediate chemistry between us and we just started talking and it just felt more and more natural to work together.
Deng and White argued that the Walrus team would be able to expand on its original vision and that their skills would transfer to building a different kind of product. Airtable aims to make it easy for users to do complex things and that process is easy and seamless. With enterprise being Airtable's fastest-growing segment, its service is being used to manage very complex workflows.
White said that he thinks about how to make the floor very low for a net new creator to come onto the platform and start building, and then making sure that their core capabilities and infrastructure will allow them to scale to these massive enterprise engagements. Deng said that the Walrus team is working on big things together that involve a number of initiatives to solve end- user problems in a very elegant way.
The end of the acquis hire?
