RubyMotion Raises Millions, Becomes Free, Introduces Smart Suggestions™

Update: We hope that you folks enjoyed our April Fools prank! We are of course still 100% bootstrapped. We also still intend to grow organically thanks to your continuous support!

(Personal thanks to Josh Ballanco for having had the idea of RubyMotionCoin and MotionInflater.)

---

We are delighted to announce on this 1st April 2014 that we just closed a multi-million dollar funding transaction with Agile Ventures and Extreme Capital, two top-tier investing firms of Silicon Valley.

This is our first series A round of funding and we are extremely excited about the future of RubyMotion. Make sure to read the coverage on TechCrunch (to be published later today). You can also check a picture of our new board of directors and observe the synergy already at work.

We have been bootstrapping RubyMotion since its inception and were profitable by charging our awesome customers (from here on out referred to as users), but we think it’s now time to shift into the next gear.

Our goal is to grow RubyMotion faster into a 100-people company serving millions of users and bringing you folks tons of innovation. The entire team will also relocate into the San Francisco Bay Area (including Eloy’s new boat which presents a set of interesting logistic challenges).

We are of course still committed to a long-term vision. Unlike the majority of VC firms, our new partners Agile Venture and Extreme Capital are there for the long run and will definitely not require an exit in the next four years. (At least they said so during our meetings.)

Free, Smart Suggestions

Thanks to this funding round we no longer need to get money from you folks, so RubyMotion will become totally free. Awesome isn’t it?

We will also ship with a new feature called Smart Suggestions™ (patent pending). The RubyMotion build system will now show you suggestions of services you might want to use by scanning your project’s source code, sending us a copy, and getting back a list of relevant services. (Please note that the connection to our server is totally secure by using the same cryptography algorithms used in banks, so you should feel safe.)

Here is an example of what a future project build session might look like.

  Compile app/person.rb
  !!! It looks like you are creating a regular expressions on line 42.
      RegexBuilder™ is a new revolutionary tool that makes building
      regular expressions easier.
      Would you like to know more? [Yy]
[...]

We believe that Smart Suggestions™ will significantly increase your productivity, so we are enabling it by default for all users. Please contact our sales team if you would like to disable Smart Suggestions™.

Future Plans

Very soon we will be introducing RubyMotionCoin, a new virtual currency that is mined as a byproduct of the Xcode build system. If you include a CocoaPod in your app that contains Objective-C++ code using templates, your mining rate doubles.

Finally, we will be releasing MotionInflater later this year, a system that will automatically convert your RubyMotion code to Objective-C, ensuring that your app gains the approval of important people and allowing you to experience the inflated ego that can only come from shipping a real iOS app.