Ravi Parikh, CEO and Co-Founder of Airplane: Over $40 Million Raised to Build Better Developer Infrastructure For Internal Tooling

In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Ravi Parikh, CEO and Co-Founder of Airplane, a developer platform for internal tooling that's raised over $40 Million in funding, about why an increasingly differentiated digital economy needs a more agile toolkit for developing solutions to specific tasks. Enabling their clients to develop internal UIs with just a few lines of code, coordinate tasks and introduce custom tools across a whole range of third-party platforms, Airplane transforms basic scripts into production grade apps.

We speak to the CEO and Co-Founder about his background as a software engineer and the companies he founded before Airplane, the real world experience that inspired him to focus on internal developer tools, staying competitive in a crowded marketplace, and why Airplane decided against going ‘no-code.’

Topics Discussed:

• Ravi’s background in software engineering and analytics, and his record of founding tech-centered companies


• The personal experience with a real-world pain point that led Ravi to develop the Airplane platform


• The challenge of developing a complex platform prior to establishing product market fit


• The importance of clear competitive advantage to convince engineers that there’s a better solution than writing code themselves


• Why Airplane rejected the ‘no code’ buzzword to provide a unique offering in a crowded marketplace

Favorite book: 

High Output Management