In the startup spotlight: Slingr leads the low-code revolution, from Miami to Argentina and beyond

By Riley Kaminer

With the need for engineering talent at an all-time high, it is more important than ever for companies to develop software as efficiently as possible. Enter no-code and low-code platforms, which aim to either help developers work more quickly or enable non-technical employees to ship products themselves. The market for no-code and low-code software development platforms is large – upwards of $12 billion in 2020 – and growing at a rate of 24% annually.

Grace Schroeder has been working with low-code and no-code platforms way before the recent fad and exponential growth. She started using early versions of such platforms in the ’90s, working in insurance at Transamerica. Her other work experience, including as a Senior Director at IT firm Qwest (CenturyLink), validated the importance of low-code software, particularly for building custom automations.

At Qwest, she remembers thinking that “There has to be a way to build the custom automation that you need. How hard could that be?” Schroeder would come to learn that this was harder than anticipated. So in 2011, Schroeder founded Slingr, a low-code application development platform.

There is a diverse range of use cases for Slingr, which has customers ranging from Gordon Food Service to AI software firm Veritone. The scaleup is particularly popular with healthcare companies since it is HIPAA compliant. Schroeder told Refresh Miami that one common healthtech use case for Slingr is for lab inventory management systems, known as LIMS.

“During the pandemic, everybody discovered that none of the LIMS out there had great APIs. So all of a sudden you’re trying to go from 700 orders a day to 10,000 orders a day, and nobody’s going to start typing in 10,000 orders,” she explained. “We built e-commerce front ends for LIMS, handling everything from order processing and reporting to giving the patient a test result in a secure portal.”

Customers can engage with Slingr either by just licensing the platform for their own use, or hiring Slingr’s team of in-house developers on a monthly basis. “We get things shipped really fast,” said Schroeder. “Customers are usually logging into something in about 10 days.”

Pandemic happenstance led Schroeder to move her company and personal residence to Miami. “I was staying with an investor in Miami when Covid hit,” she explained. She decided not to return to her home in New York until things settled down, expecting to extend her stay by a week or two at most. 100 days later, Schroeder found herself signing a lease on an apartment in a building across the street. She’s been in Miami ever since and recently became a homeowner for the first time.

Currently, Schroeder is the sole Miami-based employee. However, Slingr has a team of over 100 people in Mendoza, Argentina. Schroeder underscored Miami’s geographical advantage when it comes to visiting her staff in the Southern Cone.

Slingr has followed what Schroeder has described as a ‘non-traditional’ path for investment, having raised rounds of a few hundred thousand dollars whenever the funds were necessary. Overall, she estimates that Slingr has raised about $2.5 to $3 million. The company’s growth began to accelerate last year when it hit its stride in terms of customer retention. 

It’s only up from here, signaled Schroeder. “Every enterprise should have a low-code platform as part of their stack. There’s room in it for every enterprise.”

READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:

Riley Kaminer