While MIT App Inventor’s original target was educators and students, offering a free learning tool to lower the barrier of entry to coding, the pair say the success of the software - which has been used to make some 13 million apps at this point, and garnered 4.3 million registered users - called for spinning out of the academic setting. (To be clear, Thunkable’s code will not be open source, although they say they do hope to take in community contributions in future.)

Hence the decision to seek to commercialize the core technology under a new name, building atop the MIT open source code with new features they hope will also support their intention to monetize down the line. So why the fork of the original MIT project now? The success of MIT’s App Inventor meant it had outgrown the resources afforded it within academia, say Thunkable’s co-founders Arun Saigal (CEO) and WeiHua Li (CTO). And a clear path to encourage over more of their old users - and bring on new ones too. The same core tech the pair are now aiming to build a business on.Īnd while they don’t yet have all those millions of users locked into their new tool, they do have some 50,000 people signed up about month after launching their free app builder. Bagging lots of users is a challenge one of the startups in Y Combinator’s 2016 winter batch is worrying about a bit less than the average. The two-man strong founder team of Thunkable is coming from the rather more comfortable position of already having fostered a community over four million strong - thanks to the drag-and-drop app builder interface they helped developed at MIT some five years ago.

App builder software 2016