Basedash raises $4.5M led by Matrix

I’m excited to share that Basedash has raised $4.5M in funding from Matrix, Y Combinator, Form Capital, Worklife, and many prominent angels including the founders of Figma, Notion, and BloomTech.

Several people have asked about my plans for Basedash, so I figured now would be a good time to talk about our long-term vision and how we’ll use this funding to get there.

In short, the Master Plan is:

1. Build the best admin panel in existence
2. Expand to support all other types of internal tools
3. Build everything AI-first so that it all works for any company with zero configuration

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I started Basedash with the simple idea that great internal tools shouldn’t just be for large companies with dedicated teams.

When I say internal tools, I mean any software that a company makes for its own employees vs. what it sells to customers. This software is essential to the operations of any tech company, but many other businesses rely on it too.

These tools cover many use cases and might differ from one company to another. One use case that is super common though, is an admin panel that helps employees interact with the company’s data—whether that’s for tracking new signups, letting support teams update user info, managing workspace subscriptions, etc.

Despite their prevalence, we still don’t have a universal standard for these types of admin panels, which means that every company is forced to build its own from scratch. Think about that for a second: There are hundreds of thousands of businesses with the same use case that have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to scale their operations.

This has led to a bunch of problems, but two in particular stand out.

The first is that it’s enormously time consuming to build and maintain custom tooling. A single internal tool can suck up hundreds of developer hours—time that’s almost certainly better spent shipping core product.

Now more than ever, companies recognize that engineers are a precious resource they can’t afford to waste. And if you’re a small startup who needs to move fast, any amount of wasted time can be fatal. Yet, everyone puts up with it, simply because there’s no better alternative.

The second problem is that internal apps are always secondary to a company’s core product, which means they’re not built with the same level of craft you’d expect from modern software.

Apps like Linear, Superhuman, and Cron have set the standard for quality that we expect out of software today. But it kills me that so many knowledge workers still spend 90% of their time working in apps that have nowhere near that level of polish.

This all seems ridiculous when you consider that the core functionality of every admin panel is pretty much the same: some kind of interface that you use to view, edit and manage your data.

None of this is ideal.

We’d like to solve these problems by making universal tools that have the same level of quality and craft as today’s best software. To start, we’ve built a product that automatically generates a UI on top of your production database in just a couple clicks. No SQL, no JavaScript, no dragging-and-dropping. It just works.

A lot of this magic is thanks to deep integrations with AI across the product experience. You may not even notice, but AI currently does everything from writing queries for you, to configuring columns within a view, to automatically setting emojis on new pages. Our goal is for AI to do 99% of the work building your admin panel, so that all you need to do is connect your database and invite your team.

Eventually, AI will be front and center in the product. Not only will it help with the initial setup, but it will also make you 10x faster at the actual work you do every day. We're working on these features as we speak, so stay tuned :)

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We’ve had our heads down for three years, talking to thousands of companies and building a product that is as secure, collaborative, and performant as the admin tools you’d see at the most sophisticated software companies. All in a fraction of the time to set up.

We’re starting with admin panels because that’s where the problems are most obvious, but we’re quickly expanding the types of internal tools we support. Think: better insights into your data, easier automated workflows, and less jumping between tools to get work done.

As we expand the product, our users will automatically gain new tools to work with, until eventually, all of your team’s admin work will be possible inside of Basedash. We’ll basically become the operating system for all of your company’s operations.

We’ve assembled one of the best teams to tackle this problem, but we can’t do it without you. Try creating your first admin panel in Basedash (it takes literally 2 minutes) and let me know what you think.

We’re just getting started.

– Max