Craft, clarity, and a little wonder
There is a particular feeling at the heart of building software — part craft, part clarity, part wonder. It is the reason engineers fall for the work in the first place. It is also, unfortunately, sealed behind a wall of syntax.
In late 2019, Nadia, Rem, Joaquín and I went looking at earlier attempts to take that wall down and open software-making to everyone. Plenty were clever. None of them moved us. We wanted something that would hold the same feeling for anyone who tried it.
We started building Kestrel in 2020. For reach, we picked the most widely used programming surface ever made: the spreadsheet. For craft, we added a design layer that turns those rows into interfaces people actually want to open. For wonder, we kept the parts that still surprise us.
Then the ground shifted, and Kestrel found its people. Tens of thousands of them, in every timezone, with no coding background, building tools for their businesses, their neighbourhoods, their families, and occasionally for the sheer fun of it.
Last year the work got serious. From a two-van plumbing outfit tracking stock, to a distribution group coordinating eleven depots, to a national golf association running an international tournament — we watched Kestrel slot in beside the spreadsheets teams already trusted and hand people in operations, HR and sales a set of powers they had never been offered.
Today we are levelling up: Tablebase and Columnar support, richer layouts and components for Kestrel Pages, a template library you can actually browse, and new team plans built to unlock what an organisation already knows. And Northlight Partners as our partner in it.
Our mission is to put the craft, the clarity and the wonder of software-making into the hands of a billion new makers. We cannot wait to see what you build.
Ada Winterbourne
Co-founder & CEO
