Singapore-headquartered venture capital firm Golden Gate Ventures has participated in a $4.25-million funding round by Locofy.ai, a platform that converts graphic designs into working code with AI, according to an announcement.
The investment, which is one of Southeast Asia’s largest pre-seed rounds for an AI startup, was joined by other investors including Dropbox, Lottiefiles, and Zopim.
The latest round brings Locofy.ai’s total fundraising to $7.3 million since its incorporation in 2021.
The funding will accelerate the startup’s plans to simplify the design-to-code conversion significantly with AI while adding more integrations to the platform to seamlessly fit into the workflows.
Golden Gate Ventures spotted Locofy.ai’s potential early on, identifying the startup’s ability to tap into the ever-growing low-code platform market and participating in the startup’s first institutional investment round in 2021.
“The early-stage investment scene is all about identifying trends ahead of an inflection point, and to be the FirstIN: the first institutional investor into the startup, at the right time. Our investments into the AI space pre-date the buzz around ChatGPT. Being FirstIN enables us to help founders ahead of anyone else and yields higher returns for our investors,” said Vinnie Lauria, founding partner at Golden Gate Ventures.
Lauria said that Golden Gate Ventures started investing in AI startups over five years ago when most of the market was sceptical about their return on investment. AI is going to dramatically transform go-to-market strategies and accelerate e-commerce development at an exponential rate.
“We will see an unrivalled rate of innovation, which coincides perfectly with the rising consumer class across Southeast Asia’s fast-growing economies,” he added.
Locofy.ai is a low-code development tool in public beta which assists developers worldwide in building and managing their frontend at speed. It accelerates Web and mobile app development by 5-10 times with its design-to-code conversion platform that helps designers automate frontend code directly from their designs and extend into existing workflows. It currently converts Figma and Adobe XD designs into React, React Native, HTML-CSS, Gatsby, and Next.js code with AI.
Founded in 2011, Golden Gate Ventures opened two new offices in Vietnam in May last year, with Lauria moving to Ho Chi Minh City to lead the country team.