ByteDance Acquires No-Code Developer Hipacloud
No-code developer Hipacloud announced today that it will stop providing services and maintenance of its website as its operations have now been taken over by Bytedance. Technology media outlet 36Kr learned from several independent sources that the company’s team has been acquired by ByteDance, and the founder Chen Jinzhou and some team members have joined Feishu, an enterprise collaboration platform owned by Bytedance.
“After Chen joined ByteDance, he will report directly to Xie Xin, Vice President of ByteDance, who is in charge of the business of Feishu,” several insiders said.
In Hipacloud’s announcement today, its team said that users can export their data before May 31, 2022. Customers whose packages have not expired can apply for a refund or migrate their business to Mingdao.com, Hipacloud’s partner.
In July 2021, Hipacloud announced that it had received funding through an A round of financing from ByteDance. At the beginning of this year, the original shareholders, including Wuhan Quanying Technology Partnership (Limited Partnership) and Beijing Quantum Jump Technology Co., Ltd. a subsidiary of ByteDance, withdrew from the ownership structure of Hipacloud.
Founded in 2019, Hipacloud is positioned as an online form design and data collection tool. A related person said that this acquisition was driven by the Feishu business team, and Feishu already had multi-dimensional forms and other similar products. After some discussion, it was decided to roll up Hipacloud’s business operations.
China’s no-code/low-code investment boom began after 2019 with developers such as Jiandaoyun.com, Authine, Qingliu and Yijingcloud.com, securing large financing deals since then. Manufacturers are generally divided into two routes: one is to take the large customer market and provide project services; the other is to target the SME market and provide products. Hipacloud prefers the latter.
The closure of Hipacloud also reflects the difficulties of this market. An industry source said that the company’s strengths lay in its research and production, but its weakness stems from difficulties in its commercialization efforts. Part of the problem is that the company’s focus, the SME market, has itself been undergoing some turbulent times, thus having a knock-on effect to Hipacloud and others.
SEE ALSO: ByteDance Raises VR Equipment Sales Target
On the other hand, around 2020, giants such as Alibaba and Tencent began to enter the low-code platform market. At the beginning of 2021, Alibaba Cloud connected its internal low-code development platform YiDa with DingTalk, while Tencent also launched WeDa, a low-code development platform.
