For four years the founders of Interplay have been working below the radar trying to solve a tricky problem bridging the gap between code and design. This week Michael Fitzgerald and Adam Walters are going to reveal the first public beta version of their product, also called Interplay, after building up a waiting list of 15,000 designers and engineers. 

Interplay has also just closed its first pre-seed round of €1.2 million led by Irish venture capital fund ACT. Enterprise Ireland (EI) also backed the round as did various interesting angels, including Jimmy Fitzgerald, the president of Paddle, a revenue delivery start-up that has raised $93 million. Dave Wright, the Chief Innovation Officer of ServiceNow, the $114 billion Nasdaq listed enterprise cloud company, was an also angle investor.

Co-founder Michael Fitzgerald joins me on a video call from Sydney to tell me about the company. Based between Ireland and Australia, Interplay employs five people but intends to hire 10 more this year.  

The first thing we talk about is closing their pre-seed round. It was raised some four years after the business was founded and came at a time when Interplay’s product was at an advanced stage. 

I ask Fitzgerald how he and Walters had managed to fund the business that far. “We didn’t pay ourselves very much,” Fitzgerald laughs. “My brother was also an angel investor in our early days.” 

Fitzgerald’s brother Jimmy is president of Paddle, but he previously spent almost ten years previously at ServiceNow, leaving the year before it went public. 

“A couple of my brother’s colleagues in ServiceNow then got wind last year of what we were doing and wanted to invest too,” Fitzgerald said, adding that Enterprise Ireland also expressed an interest in backing the business. 

“Then ACT got wind of what we were doing, and they wanted to get in as well. It was the space of a week from the first introduction with Andrew O’Neill (a principle in ACT) and them investing. It happened really quickly.”

Interplay used some of the seed round to expediate bringing their product to launch, while the rest is earmarked for sales, marketing, and more product development. 

FitzGerald said Interplay expected to do a seed round later this year. “Probably €5 million,” he said. “Getting investment helps but you don’t want too much cash, so you’re forced to spend it in the wrong areas.

“Raising cash is always helpful but the real reason say we got the ServiceNow people in was more from an advisor perspective. It is really to get that incredible SaaS software experience (they have) under our belt.”

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Andrew O’Neill joined ACT three years ago, and his firm recently invested in a $3.25 million round in Clearword. I wanted to ask him what he saw in Interplay that convinced ACT to invest in it after just a week.

“A lot of great design tools have made design more accessible than ever over the last decade,” he explained via email. “As everyone can be a designer now, and more design tasks are becoming automated, the role of the designer is transitioning to more niche design roles as it becomes more systematic. You have chief design officers, creative experience designers, UX architects, design systems lead and more. You have ‘design-first’ companies like Airbnb that built design systems in order to scale – as product complexity accelerated.

“Interplay allows these companies to work within existing workflows and maintain their ever-evolving design systems, so design work doesn’t get outdated with the existing code components and one source of truth exists.”

While specialised, the area of linking design to engineering is a booming area. Software design’s hottest start-up Figma, which launched in 2016, raised $200 million last summer at a $10 billion valuation. Interplay is already working closely with this company, and it has built an integration that allows users to import their design system code repository and design with code components in Figma.

“Figma is one of the most impressive companies in the industry. It is absolutely an inspiration for any company working in design software,” O’Neill said.

According to Fitzgerald: “We have had a good relationship with Figma for years even before they started taking over from Sketch (a rival design software firm) which was the dominant player before.”

He said Interplay had gone on calls with Figma salespeople, as its software made it easier for users of Sketch to migrate their work over. “One of our core things to integrate with design workflow,” Fitzgerald said, add that Adobe had given Interplay a grant to develop their product to work with its design product Adobe XD. 

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Interplay co-founders Michael Fitzgerald and Adam Walters

Michael Fitzgerald originally trained as an aeronautical engineer in the University of Limerick, before doing a BSC in Information technology at DCU. After university, he spent three years as a programmer in banking before emigrating to Australia in 2001. In 2002 he founded his own company, Collaborative Technologies (CT), an enterprise software consultancy. CT worked with big companies like Exxon Mobil, Rio Tinto, Cadbury and DHL helping them implement Oracle, Microsoft and other software products.

Fitzgerald got to know his co-founder Walters via this consultancy when he was working with a client. In 2007 he convinced him to join CT, and the idea for Interplay came out of the challenges they could see facing their customers.

“We felt the pain first hand of designers and engineers not being able to connect,” Fitzgerald said. “There was an awful lot of manual work going on, and we saw an opportunity to do things better.”

Initially, Interplay was a side project, but gradually it became full-time. Interplay has managed to build up a buzz around it via a slow drip-feed of information about their new venture on social media or at an occasional industry talk.

In 2013 Fitzgerald moved back to Ireland with his young family, but he continued working closely with Walters with CT before they launched Interplay. Based between Sydney, Australia and Ireland, Interplay has gradually released more information about how it allows designers and engineers to collaborate using code making it much faster and easier to develop new products.

Interplay works closely with about 50 teams who are using and testing its product. Fitzgerald said its sweet spot was tech firms with between 100 and 200 employees, but that it also worked with start-ups and big tech companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and TikTok.  They’ve used the feedback from all these teams to keep iteratively improving their product ahead of emerging publicly this week.

He said letting in the 15,000 people in on Interplay’s waiting list would be an exciting moment. “There is no guarantee we will convert them all into paying customers, but it just shows the demand is there,” Fitzgerald said. “Now we have to ensure the product is right for everyone.”

Having been years in the making, Interplay is now ready for action.