Ply, a no-code platform with a difference has emerged from stealth. It was founded in 2021 by Yaniv Tross, CEO, Zohar Sakal, COO and Guy Schlider, CTO. It has already raised $5 million in seed funding from Aleph, Slow Ventures, and Samsung Next and is also supported by executives from Salesforce, Google and Atlassian.
Ply has built a no-code platform that embeds features into existing applications rather than building applications to add to them. The platform supports integrations to at least 40 applications, including Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Freshdesk, Github, Gmail, HubSpot, Jira, monday.com, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Shopify, Slack, Teamwork, Trello and Twitter.
Yaniv Tross, Ply’s CEO, commented, “Over the last decade, countless low/no-code tools have emerged to allow building automations, tools and databases. While some use-cases require a new dedicated tool, most of the time having a contextual solution is 10x more effective. It’s more productive, faster to create, easier to onboard to, and effortless to adopt. But mostly, it’s what users actually want. Think about it this way, when a software company wants to solve a problem for its users, it doesn’t create an entire new product. It adds a feature where the problem is. Ply is making this the reality for ops and internal product teams too.”
What can Ply do?
Ply lets organisations create what it calls “features” within applications. It allows users to create buttons and additional interfaces within applications to automate processes the application doesn’t support. These contextual features can use data on the current screen to extract information from another application. For example, if you email a contact in Gmail, you can build an app that will extract data from their Salesforce record that will form part of the emails.
It supports the capture of notifications from different applications allowing users to surface them in another application they currently use. For example, surfacing a Salesforce notification within Ply or Slack or even sending an email. Ply can also build additional automation by surfacing a button that the user can click, if a notification is sent that requires further action.
Ply also has native integration with OpenAI, enabling organisations to easily create contextual AI solutions. What isn’t clear is what data set it draws on for that integration and whether this is an API accessing the public or a private version.
Beta customers are enthused by the platform, with Ron Oren, Co-Founder and COO, Imagen noting, “Ply is a multiple for our growing CS team – we’ve created our own version of Zendesk. It makes onboarding new CSMs a breeze. My favourite thing about Ply is that the team has nothing new to learn.”
The company is now emerging from a closed beta that saw it working with several small companies and enterprises. It can now see more use cases built on a stable and mature platform.
Tross added, “We’ve seen an interesting process with nearly all of our customers, regardless of their size. They start with simple hacks to eliminate copying and pasting like ‘send ticket to slack’, and within a few weeks, they’re building complex business logic into vendor apps – things like sales playbooks, employee onboarding and legal approvals.
“We started out building Ply for ops and IT, which are still our main customers, but we’ve quickly discovered that people in almost every role are building features. It’s an intuitive need – if you’ve ever said to yourself ‘I wish Gmail could do that thing’ then you get it. From developers to account executives and CSMs, everyone has an itch they want to scratch with Ply.”
Now in open beta, Ply is free in beta, according to its website, but the company believe it will launch with a free tier for usual users and then priced per user with an “affordable” tier for nearly unlimited usage. Beta customers will attract a discount once pricing is published.
Security by design
With integrations between multiple applications comes a security risk. However, Ply has developed a security platform that complements the product. It ensures that every application connection uses an account token for each user. This ensures that the relevant permission sets for each application are supported.
Why Ply also differentiates itself is a focus on security and governance. The solution supports role-based access controls and enables organisations to sync the roles and groups from other applications to automate permissioning across the platform. Organisations can also create granular security policies and publicises their security credentials. These include adherence to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CSA Star level One and Cyber Essentials (not cyber essentials plus), and the UK NCSC standard. This complex security architecture is easy for small businesses and simple to apply for larger organisations with more complex requirements.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
The idea behind Ply is not new. Applications have been around for some time, performing screen scraping and integrating with other solutions to draw information back. Ply is different because it has chosen to provide a long list of integrations to a wide variety of platforms. Also, that it is a no-code platform will enable citizen developers to build those applications.
However, those integrations are limited. It will be interesting to see if beta customers can request the development of more API hooks to create more integrations to other applications. The challenge will be that as the integration points grow, those citizen developers may need a greater understanding of the back end of the applications they are working with. How will Ply solve this?
For some organisations, a no-code platform to develop these features will solve many automation challenges their current platforms do not support without developing code. However, Ply will need to find the common use cases on widely used applications. It will be interesting to see how it develops these use cases and if they are tied to a single application, whether that vendor considers acquiring Ply.
