Mermaid, the open supply diagramming and charting software, has lengthy been in style with builders for its skill to create diagrams utilizing a Markdown-like language. As is usually the case, Mermaid founder Knut Sveidqvist created the mission as a result of he noticed a necessity for it in his personal job as a software program architect after which open sourced it with none instant plans for monetization. Then, in 2022, he was approached by Open Core Ventures (OCV), the enterprise capital agency of GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij, which later paired him with serial entrepreneur and investor Andrew Firestone as his CEO.

Now the corporate, which builds hosted providers across the open supply mission, introduced that it has raised a $7.5 million seed funding spherical from OCV, Sequoia and Microsoft’s M12 fund (amongst a couple of dozen extra angel buyers).

There’s some irony in Microsoft investing in Mermaid now. Sveidqvist tells me that the preliminary impetus for creating Mermaid was a misplaced Microsoft Visio file. “I needed to redraw every little thing. So on the way in which house, I assumed there needed to be a greater manner of doing this. It was additionally the time when markdown was beginning to kick in. Can’t we’ve this as textual content? That was the concept. Later that night time, I sat down in the lounge with my children. They had been watching TV and I began the mission. They had been watching ‘The Little Mermaid.’ That’s why I named that eight years in the past.”

Early on, Mermaid was largely about flowcharts, however over time Sveidqvist added different diagram sorts — and the group rapidly made it its personal, too. And it’s gotten fairly in style. Firestone instructed me that the cloud model of the open supply mission had 4 million customers final yr.

Picture Credit: Mermaid Chart

The OCV system is to search for in style initiatives with good founders and co-found an organization with them to commercialize these initiatives. Typically, which means bringing in a CEO with enterprise expertise to enhance what is usually a technical co-founder. What additionally helps, after all, is that these initiatives have already got a monitor report, which in flip de-risks the funding fairly a bit.

“Matching the open supply software program with the enterprise studio mannequin, with Sid Sijbrandij’s sort of background, with the capital — while you stack these issues collectively, you now you’ve gotten these seed-stage firms that appear like they could have been de-risked a lot as a sequence A. You get a lot of a view into the longer term on product-market match, which was actually particular for me coming in,” Firestone defined.

Firestone added that thousands and thousands of non-technical customers want diagramming and flowchart instruments. That’s a market Mermaid Chart is seeking to handle by constructing easier-to-use instruments for this group of customers. However the total imaginative and prescient is considerably bigger and isn’t a lot about disrupting the likes of Lucidchart or Miro. Mermaid Chart desires to go after ServiceNow and related workflow automation providers, Firestone instructed me. However that’s nonetheless fairly a methods off.

For now, the staff is squarely targeted on constructing out its service and reaching a broader viewers. As soon as an organization goes all-in on Mermaid Chart, although, the software has the potential to turn out to be a significant data base, which may then lay the groundwork to allow the corporate’s broader course of automation imaginative and prescient.

As a text-based software, there’ll all the time be a comparatively excessive barrier to entry, one thing the staff is sort of conscious of. That’s why the corporate lately added a visible editor as properly. That’s an opt-in function, although. Customers who need and just like the text-based method can proceed to take action (and change between the 2 interfaces at will).

As well as, to make Mermaid much more accessible, the staff additionally skilled its personal AI mannequin to permit customers to create charts with the assistance of a chat interface, for instance. For paying customers, the AI may also repair a diagram while you botch the syntax.

“Mermaid’s open-core is loved by thousands and thousands of software program engineers globally, and its software program is supported natively in GitLab, GitHub, and others,” stated Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab and founding father of Open Core Ventures. “Mermaid Chart is increasing the group by bringing the advantages of Mermaid to all varieties of enterprise customers, leveraging AI as a catalyst. The use instances and enterprise alternatives adjoining to the expertise are vital and we’re excited to assist the staff on this subsequent part of development.”

Correction: Between my first dialog with Mermaid Charts and as we speak, the staff raised extra funding and added buyers. We’ve up to date the story to mirror that.