Software accessibility startup Kinde banks $10.6 million seed round

Sydney tech startup Kinde has raised $10.6 million (US$7.55m) in seed funding.

The round was led by Blackbird Ventures, supported by Californian VC Felicis Ventures, which previously backed local tech companies Canva, Culture Amp and Dovetail.

The startup hopes to “democratise” software engineering by providing the infrastructure SaaS ventures need to get started.

Kinde was co-founded by Ross Chaldecott, whose CV includes Atlassian, Shopify and Campaign Monitor – the latter where co-founders Dave Berner and Evgeny Komarevtsev met. They founded Kinde last year. It now has seven staff in a distributed team, with plans to quadruple that number in 2022.

Chaldecott said Kinde hopes to build a world with more founders, making building a software startup easier and more approachable.

“It shouldn’t be only engineers who think about starting SaaS companies – but anyone with an idea. We’re democratising software by shortening the distance between having an idea and getting it into the hands of people who need it,” he said.

“Giving them access to this technology – that historically only established businesses could afford – means they can accelerate from day 1.”

Chaldecott said he’s spent his career thinking about the problem and seeing it first-hand in SaaS businesses of all sizes.

“The impact of decisions made in their very first few months of existence can haunt them for years. The scope of this thing is huge,” he said

“It’s really one of the last truly universal problems in tech. Companies like Meta and Slack have solved the universal problem of social connection online – how we interact online as people. Companies like Amazon and Shopify have solved the retail problem – how we sell things online.

“But there is this huge gap when it comes to the universal problem of SaaS infrastructure – enabling people who have ideas to rapidly start and grow their businesses. We want to change that.”

Berner, Kinde’s VP of Engineering , said he’d worked on a lot of apps “and inevitably ended up building the same core components over and over again” in features that have nothing to do with the products.

“What we provide is all those building blocks to enable founders to focus solely on what makes their product special and get it to market as fast as possible,” he said.

Kinde’s product will include tools for founders to authenticate and manage their users, create feature flags for managing access within their products, and build feature plans for billing their customers.

Felicis general partner Victoria Treyger said: “I can’t imagine a better focus for our fourth Felicis investment in Australia’s tech ecosystem than the Kinde platform, which empowers founders everywhere with the infrastructure components needed to start any SaaS company.”