Glide

David Siegel, Mark Probst, Jason Smith and Antonio García Aprea—former Xamarin colleagues whose prior company was acquired by Microsoft—founded Glide in 2018. The early product converted Google Sheets into mobile-like progressive web apps; after Y Combinator W19 it evolved into a visual, data-centric application platform with Glide Tables/Big Tables, computed columns, workflows, integrations, custom components, role-based access and AI steps/agents. Glide focuses increasingly on internal operations such as inventory, field service, procurement, CRM, inspections, HR and finance rather than mass-market consumer apps. It raised $3.6m seed led by First Round Capital in 2019 and $20m Series A led by Benchmark in April 2022, roughly $23.6m total. At the A, 500,000 users had built about one million apps with only 15 employees, evidence of strong organic distribution but not necessarily paid retention. Current product/pricing shifted again in 2026 to GlideOS: Free, Solo around $25/month and Team around $125/month, with credits/member and higher enterprise/custom terms; a prior 2025 plan structure (Explorer/Maker/Business) should not be treated as current. Core revenue comes from subscriptions, members/users, compute/AI credits, data updates and enterprise services. Risks include pricing/plan churn, costs that rise with private users/updates, vendor data-source/API dependence, limits for consumer-scale apps, customer-built app security/governance and intense no-/low-code/AI competition.

Founding story

The Xamarin alumni saw spreadsheets already functioning as informal databases and made a tool that could instantly render them as useful mobile apps, then expanded into a general business-app operating system.

Business model

Multi-tenant no-code/AI application platform sold by workspace/team plan, usage/credits and enterprise contracts.

Monthly/annual subscriptions plus members, data updates/rows, AI/compute credits, integrations and custom enterprise volume/support; free tier drives acquisition.

Traction

April 2022: 500k builders/users and one million apps created. Current third-party estimates cite 100k customers and tens of employees but paid/active definitions and revenue are not verified; they remain unresolved rather than asserted.

Latest developments

Glide markets GlideOS as an AI-powered system for business operations with Solo/Team packaging, integrated database/workflows and AI credits, while continuing community/custom app creation.