Onymos, a “feature as a service” platform for application development, today announced the closing of a $12 million Series A funding round led by Great Point Ventures with participation from Benhamou Global Ventures, Engineering Capital and Industry Ventures. The funds will be invested in product development and ramping up Onymos’ go-to-market activities, according to CEO Shiva Nathan, as well as product and service development.
Nathan presented Onymos’ sales pitch via email: “The proliferation of software as a service creates complexity and a lack of visibility for businesses and their applications,” he told TechCrunch . “For a team of corporate engineers, the balance went from having to choose from a few long-term vendors to being overwhelmed by the myriad of choices. Even after choosing services, every app is at the mercy of trillion-dollar companies that sooner or later could deprecate those services, change their implementation, or introduce updates that are incompatible with your current build environment. We want to change this paradigm.
For Nathan, app development can be time-consuming and expensive. According to a 2018 Stripe investigation, the average developer spends over 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues such as debugging and refactoring. Additionally, they spend about four hours a week on “bad code,” which equates to nearly $85 billion worldwide in lost opportunity cost each year, Stripe estimates.
Picture credits: Onymos
Onymos aims to help developers offload some of the work by providing out-of-the-box functionality that can be inserted into new and existing applications. The platform offers login, biometrics, chat, data storage, location services, and notification modules that include necessary components including user interface, underlying logic, and server-side functions. necessary to process data in the cloud (for example, public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform).
The promise of a maintenance-free and completely secure application development future with Onymos is probably too good to be true – every platform, no matter how holistic, has bugs after all. But what services like Onymos can offer is time to devote to other more important product R&D tasks, at least in theory.
“Companies can have their software developers spend time debugging critical cases in Meta’s Graph API for Facebook Login or leverage their creativity and knowledge to build real value-added capabilities that help their employers to earn. We think the choice is clear,” Nathan said. “The Onymos platform… takes the complexity out of application development by acting as an integration layer for software vendors and allowing customers to rely on a single endpoint. When companies use the features of Onymos, they don’t have to worry about OS and API updates, device compatibility, or maintenance.
“Feature-as-a-service” is an old idea, dating back at least several years. There is Localytics for social networks and Mapbox for localization. Storyteller lets anyone add Instagram-style stories to their own apps or website. Meanwhile, WorkOS offers developers enterprise features such as single sign-on and directory synchronization with applications.
Nathan sees expansion, especially in the area of machine learning, as Onymos’ path to differentiation.
“We plan to expand our product portfolio into the machine learning space, introduce new end-to-end features, and support more development frameworks,” Nathan said. “What we’ve seen working with healthcare customers is that there’s so much need for optical character recognition and data extraction. These processes are still too time-consuming for businesses, and there is an opportunity to introduce new efficiencies.
Onymos currently has 30 people on its payroll and expects to have between 40 and 60 by the end of the year. To date, the company has raised $15 million.
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