Startup Deep Dive : Appsmith — revenue fell a third in FY25 even as its open-source project crossed 40,000 GitHub stars

Appsmith’s own regulatory filings show its Indian operating unit’s revenue falling 31.8% in the year to March 2025, to Rs 33.9 crore (about $3.5 million), even as the open-source project it ships sits on more than 40,000 GitHub stars — more than any other tool built for internal software. A company that built one of the most-adopted open-source developer projects out of Bengaluru cannot yet turn that adoption into growing revenue, and it laid off a quarter of its staff along the way.

Appsmith is a low-code platform that lets engineers build internal tools — admin panels, dashboards, support consoles — by dragging together pre-built UI components wired to a company’s own databases and APIs, instead of hand-coding the same CRUD screens for the hundredth time. It is free and open source at the core, monetised through a usage-based enterprise tier, and it has raised money from Insight Partners and Canaan Partners on the strength of a genuinely large developer community. Whether that community converts into a durable business is the open question the numbers below try to answer.

Quick facts

What they do

Appsmith sells a platform that lets developers build internal business applications — the admin panels, ops dashboards, customer-support consoles and approval workflows that every company needs but almost never buys off the shelf — far faster than writing the front end from scratch. A developer connects the tool to a database or API (Appsmith says it supports 25 or more data sources), drags in pre-built UI widgets such as tables, forms and charts, and wires them up with JavaScript rather than hand-rolled HTML and CSS. The core product is open source and free to self-host; the company monetises a hosted, enterprise-grade tier on top of it. Its customers are engineering teams inside mid-sized and large companies, and, per the CEO’s own description in a February 2023 interview with research firm Sacra, the people who end up paying are the business users who use the finished internal app, not the engineers who build it.

The origin

The idea did not arrive as a flash of insight so much as a repeated bruise. Abhishek Nayak, Arpit Mohan and Nikhil Nandagopal are all BITS Pilani engineers who had already worked together, and separately, at fast-growing Indian companies — Mohan and Nayak had co-founded two earlier startups, and the trio’s day jobs before Appsmith included stints at Flipkart, Ola-backed logistics ventures, ride-hailing firm Ola’s fitness spinout Cure.fit and food-delivery arm Eat.fit. Appsmith’s own account of its founding, published on its blog, describes the specific triggers: Nayak had watched a previous venture’s daily active users jump from 5,000 to 120,000 in a single week, and Nandagopal had seen Eat.fit’s daily orders spike from 50 to 50,000, and in both cases the bottleneck was not the customer-facing app — it was the internal tools engineers had to bolt together overnight to keep the business running. Mohan, working as a backend engineer at Cure.fit, had built the same kind of admin panel and control-panel software at three different companies and disliked writing the HTML and CSS each time. The founders’ own estimate, repeated in a 2022 interview, was that companies routinely spend somewhere between 5% and 40% of engineering time on internal software that can never be bought as a finished product. That gap was the business.

The struggle years

Two setbacks mark Appsmith’s path, on either side of its growth years. The first came before the company had any customers at all. According to an October 2022 interview Nayak gave to the newsletter Sand Hill Road, the team spent roughly five to six months testing the idea part-time before committing to it full-time in 2019, then spent close to a year building before they dared show it to anyone outside a small circle. Even then, early testers used the product for a few days and quietly left — the quality was not good enough to hold anyone. It took a further stretch of fixing before Appsmith was ready to launch in public, which it finally did in July 2020, roughly a year after the founders had gone all-in. There was no single dramatic failure in that period, just a slow, unglamorous grind of a product that was not yet good enough, funded by a modest seed round and a founding team’s own conviction.

The second setback came after the company had already raised serious money. In September 2023, having closed a $41 million Series B a little over a year earlier, Appsmith laid off 35 employees — about 25% of its workforce of roughly 140 — citing challenging market conditions and a deliberate shift from rapid headcount growth toward sustainable, efficient growth, according to Inc42’s report at the time. CEO Nayak told staff, in comments Inc42 quoted directly, that “the impact of reducing our team size is a terrible thing for many of us and one that I’m deeply sorry about,” while also pointing to the company’s strongest revenue growth in recent quarters as a reason the business still needed heavier R&D investment rather than headcount for its own sake. It was part of a much wider reckoning across venture-backed Indian startups that year — Inc42 counted more than 28,000 layoffs across the sector since the funding window had tightened in 2022 — but it was Appsmith’s own reckoning nonetheless, and its headcount has kept shrinking since: independent tracking by Tracxn put the company at 33 employees as of August 2025, down 37% from a year earlier.

The turning point

If there is a single event that separates “promising open-source project” from “venture-scale company” in Appsmith’s story, it is the $41 million Series B it closed in June 2022, led by Insight Partners with Canaan Partners and Accel participating, according to Insight Partners’ own announcement and Inc42’s reporting. On one side of that round: an eight-month-old Series A of $8 million, a project that had crossed roughly 20,000 GitHub stars, and — per Insight Partners’ own investment note — more than 10,000 teams using the platform monthly, including reported adoption inside Microsoft by 500 to 1,000 internal users. On the other side: a company that scaled to roughly 95 employees across 16 countries within months, went from a project barely two years past its public launch to one of the better-funded open-source infrastructure bets to come out of India, and then, fourteen months later, cut a quarter of the team it had just built out. The raise did not fail on its own terms — it bought Appsmith runway and credibility — but it also marks the point after which the company’s growth curve and its headcount curve diverge sharply, which is the tension the rest of this piece works through.

The money behind it

Appsmith has raised a total of $51.5 million across three rounds since 2019, according to Tracxn’s tally (Inc42’s own count of $49 million covers only the Series A and Series B, excluding the seed):

• Seed — $2.5 million (2019/2020): led by Accel. This let the founders go full-time and fund the year-long build described above.
• Series A — $8 million (announced October 2021): led by Canaan Partners, with Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, OSS Capital and angel investor Prasanna Sankar (CTO of Rippling) participating, per TechCrunch and Inc42’s reporting. This round came after the product had already crossed 5 million downloads and roughly 1,000 enterprise users in over 100 countries, per Appsmith’s own funding announcement carried by Businesswire.
• Series B — $41 million (announced June 2022): led by Insight Partners, with Canaan Partners and Accel returning, per Insight Partners’ own investment announcement and Inc42.

No round has come with a disclosed valuation. Both Tracxn and funding-tracker Clay independently describe Appsmith’s valuation as undisclosed at every stage, including the 2022 Series B — an unusual level of opacity for a round of that size, and one the company has not corrected in any subsequent public statement.

How it makes money

Appsmith runs a rare pricing model for enterprise software: it charges by usage of the finished app, not by the number of engineers who build it. Founder and CEO Abhishek Nayak laid out the mechanics to research firm Sacra in February 2023:

• Unit of charge: the business users who log into an internal application built on Appsmith — not the developers who build or maintain it, which stays free.
• Rate: roughly $0.40 per business user per hour of active use, capped at $20 per user per month — a usage-based structure Nayak called a “shared risk model,” where Appsmith only earns when the customer’s internal tool is actually being used.
• Use-case mix: about 60% of usage sits in customer-facing operations — onboarding and support workflows — with the remaining 40% spread across engineering processes, CI/CD tooling, DevOps and industry-specific internal apps, per the same interview.
• Distribution: the company says it has never sent a cold email or run a paid ad; growth has come from the open-source project itself pulling in developers, who then bring the paid tier into their employer.
• The part people get wrong: being open source is not a charity move — it is the sales funnel. A free, self-hostable core lets an individual developer adopt Appsmith with no procurement process, and the paid product only has to win the argument once that developer’s internal tool is already live and being used by colleagues who cannot self-host it themselves.

That model also explains why revenue can fall even while adoption metrics such as GitHub stars keep climbing: usage-based pricing means revenue tracks how much a company’s internal tools are actually used, not how many developers have merely downloaded or starred the project.

The numbers

Appsmith Inc. does not publish consolidated financial statements. The clearest public numbers come from its Indian operating subsidiary’s filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, as analysed by Inc42 and Tofler. Free disclosure only stretches to two years of comparable revenue plus year-on-year growth rates for earlier years — not full absolute profit-and-loss figures — so this table reports what is actually verifiable rather than filling gaps:

Read together, the pattern is a company that grew its India-booked revenue fast through FY23 and FY24 off a small base, then gave back close to a third of that revenue in FY25 — the same year it was cutting headcount further and pivoting product effort toward Appsmith Agents. Absolute rupee profit-or-loss figures and pre-FY23 revenue were not available without a paid MCA filing extract, so they are omitted rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

Appsmith does not publish an audited revenue split by geography or industry, but its own executives and adoption data point to a clear pattern:

• Geographic mix: Nayak told Sacra in February 2023 that the United States is Appsmith’s largest market, followed by India, then China, then the UK, Germany, France and Japan — an order that runs opposite to the common assumption that an India-founded open-source company monetises mainly at home.
• Reach: the company says its software is used in 180 countries, a scale enabled entirely by open-source distribution rather than local sales offices.
• Use-case split: roughly 60% of usage sits in customer operations (onboarding, support) and 40% in engineering-adjacent workflows such as CI/CD and DevOps, per the same interview.
• Named users: early public case studies cited by Appsmith’s own funding announcements include Swiggy, Dunzo and WazirX in India, and reported internal deployment inside Microsoft at 500 to 1,000 users, per Insight Partners’ investment note.
• The surprise: a company incorporated and largely built in Bengaluru earns most of its revenue from customers outside India, which is also why its Indian entity’s revenue swings (like the FY25 decline) reflect global enterprise demand for its paid tier rather than the Indian market specifically.

The risks

• Open source cuts both ways: the same permissive model that fuels adoption also invites forks. Superblocks, a well-funded rival, began as a fork of Appsmith’s own codebase, has raised roughly $40 million, and — because it inherited the open-source base — benefits every time the open-source Appsmith project improves, even while shipping a closed-source product itself, a dynamic documented by comparison site Superblocks’ own materials and industry trackers.
• A much larger, better-funded direct competitor: Retool, the closest comparable player in the internal-tools category, raised its Series C at a $3.2 billion valuation in July 2022 (TechCrunch) and reported crossing $120 million in annual recurring revenue by October 2025. Appsmith has raised a combined $51.5 million with no disclosed valuation at any round — a gap in capital and reported scale that limits how much it can spend competing for the same enterprise buyers.
• Revenue and headcount both shrinking at once: FY25 revenue fell 31.8% year-on-year at the same time Tracxn recorded headcount down 37% year-on-year to 33 employees as of August 2025. A usage-based pricing model means revenue is directly exposed to customers cutting back on the volume of internal tools they run — the same belt-tightening that hits enterprise software budgets generally in a slower spending environment.

The takeaway

Appsmith’s numbers make an uncomfortable but useful point: a large, enthusiastic open-source community is not the same asset as a growing business, even when the two started out looking identical. Forty thousand GitHub stars, 10,000-plus monthly teams and adoption inside a company as large as Microsoft are real signals of product quality and distribution — they are the reason Insight Partners and Canaan Partners wrote large cheques. But none of that stopped the Indian operating entity’s revenue from falling by nearly a third in a single year, or stopped the company from cutting a quarter of its staff the year after its biggest raise. The lesson for a builder is not to distrust open source as a go-to-market strategy — Appsmith’s own funnel depends on it working — but to keep a harder eye on the layer above adoption: how many of the people who star, fork or self-host the project ever convert into a business user someone is paying $0.40 an hour for. Distribution can outrun monetisation for years before the gap between the two shows up in a filing.

Frequently asked questions

What does Appsmith actually sell?

An open-source, low-code platform that lets developers build internal business applications — admin panels, dashboards, support consoles — by wiring pre-built UI components to a company’s databases and APIs, monetised through a usage-based enterprise tier plus a newer AI-agent product, Appsmith Agents, launched in April 2025.

Who founded Appsmith and when?

Abhishek Nayak, Arpit Mohan and Nikhil Nandagopal, all BITS Pilani alumni, founded the company; its Indian entity was incorporated on 3 September 2019 in Bengaluru, and the product publicly launched in July 2020.

How much funding has Appsmith raised, and what is it worth?

A total of $51.5 million across a $2.5 million seed (Accel), an $8 million Series A in October 2021 (Canaan Partners) and a $41 million Series B in June 2022 (Insight Partners), per Tracxn. No valuation has been disclosed for any round, per both Tracxn and Clay.

Is Appsmith profitable?

Not disclosed in absolute terms. Its Indian subsidiary’s filings show EBITDA up 62.1% and net worth up 101.5% in FY24 versus FY23, but FY25 revenue then fell 31.8% year-on-year to Rs 33.9 crore, and no FY25 profit or loss figure is available in free filings.

Is Appsmith listed on any stock exchange?

No. Appsmith is privately held, with no IPO and no public listing, and it has not disclosed a valuation at any funding round to date.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Appsmith – An Enterprise Tech Funded Company Based Out Of San Francisco” (company profile, includes FY25 revenue of Rs 33.9 crore and -31.8% YoY figure), accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Appsmith Funding 2026 – Total Funding, Rounds & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Insight Partners-Backed Appsmith Lays Off 25% Of Its Workforce,” September 2023
• Inc42, “Appsmith Raises $41 Mn To Help Enterprises Build Low Code Custom Apps,” June 2022
• TechCrunch, “Appsmith raises $8M to take on the internal corporate app market with open source code,” October 2021
• TechCrunch, “Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation to make building custom software as easy as buying off the shelf,” July 2022
• Insight Partners, “Appsmith Raises $41 Million to Scale Open Source Platform that Speeds Critical Internal App Development,” June 2022
• Insight Partners, “Behind the Investment: Appsmith – Enabling the Next Billion Internal Tools,” 2022
• Businesswire, “Appsmith Announces $10.5 Million Series A and Seed Funding Rounds to Develop Low-Code Open Source Software,” October 2021
• Businesswire, “Appsmith Unveils Appsmith Agents to Transform Enterprise Business with Context Aware AI,” May 2025
• Sacra, “Abhishek Nayak, CEO of Appsmith, on building an open source internal tool builder” (founder interview: pricing model, geographic mix, use-case split), February 2023
• Sand Hill Road, “Shipping open-source, low code internal tools with Appsmith founder Abhishek Nayak” (founder interview: founding timeline, early struggles), October 2022
• Appsmith, “$10.5mn Funding Raised in Seed and Series A: How We Got Here and Where We Want to Go” (company blog: founding insight, early metrics), October 2021
• Appsmith, “Appsmith Agents Arrives April 10” (company blog), March 2025
• Tracxn, “Appsmith – Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Appsmith Software Private Limited – Legal Entity Profile & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Appsmith Software Private Limited” MCA-sourced company financials (FY24 EBITDA and net worth growth rates), accessed September 2026
• The Company Check, “Appsmith Software Private Limited” company profile (incorporation date, CIN), accessed September 2026
• Clay, “How Much Did Appsmith Raise? Funding & Key Investors,” accessed September 2026
• GitHub, “appsmithorg/appsmith” repository (current star and fork count), accessed September 2026

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