Softr, the Berlin-based no-code platform used by more than one million builders and 7,000 organizations including Netflix, Google, and Stripe, today launched what it calls an AI-native platform — a bet that the explosive growth of AI-powered app creation tools has produced a market full of impressive demos but very little production-ready business software.The company’s new AI Co-Builder lets non-technical users describe in plain language the software they need, and the platform generates a fully integrated system — database, user interface, permissions, and business logic included — connected and ready for real-world deployment immediately. The move marks a fundamental evolution for a company that spent five years building a no-code business before layering AI on top of what it describes as a proven infrastructure of constrained, pre-built building blocks.”Most AI app-builders stop at the shiny demo stage,” Softr Co-Founder and CEO Mariam Hakobyan told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the launch. “A lot of the time, people generate calculators, landing pages, and websites — and there are a huge number of use cases for those. But there is no actual business application builder, which has completely different needs.”The announcement arrives at a moment when the AI app-building market finds itself at an inflection point. A wave of so-called “vibe coding” platforms — tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit that generate application code from natural language prompts — have captured developer mindshare and venture capital over the past 18 months. But Hakobyan argues those tools fundamentally misserve the audience Softr is chasing: the estimated billions of non-technical business users inside companies who need custom operational software but lack the skills to maintain AI-generated code when it inevitably breaks.Why AI-generated app prototypes keep failing when real business data is involvedThe core tension Softr is trying to r …
