Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is injecting $90 million into tech firm WSO2, taking a stake in a low-code software maker as companies try to cope with a shortage of developers by letting salespeople, accountants and other business-line workers make their own apps.

The Wall Street bank, which is expected to announce the deal Monday, said the 16-year-old WSO2 provides “mission-critical services” for businesses across industries and added that the move aligns with Goldman’s focus on investing in high-growth software companies.

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is injecting $90 million into tech firm WSO2, taking a stake in a low-code software maker as companies try to cope with a shortage of developers by letting salespeople, accountants and other business-line workers make their own apps.

The Wall Street bank, which is expected to announce the deal Monday, said the 16-year-old WSO2 provides “mission-critical services” for businesses across industries and added that the move aligns with Goldman’s focus on investing in high-growth software companies.

Mountain View, Calif.-based WSO2 said it will use the new funding to expand its cloud-based low-code platform, which is designed to simplify the process of creating business apps for employees outside of corporate information-technology departments. It currently has 750 customers in 85 countries, including private-sector businesses, as well as state offices, hospitals, schools and other public-sector organizations.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, the company’s founder and chief executive, said the rise of remote work is putting added pressure on companies to accelerate efforts to digitize business systems in every department. But those efforts are running up against a dearth of information-technology workers, which predates the pandemic but has gotten worse in recent months, he said.

“There’s a massive shortage of skills,” Mr. Weerawarana said. Low-code software offers non-tech employees an intuitive, simple and clear way to create apps themselves, without weeks or even months of back-and-forth with IT teams, he said. “You don’t have to worry about all the technical stuff,” Mr. Weerawarana said.

Low-code platforms—or no-code, as some tech vendors call a pared down version of the tools—typically include dashboards that allow users to visualize the app-building process, without the need to manually enter computer code. As they move icons and graphics around the screen, the program accesses the necessary data, integrates other software tools, and automatically generates underlying code.

“It’s basically a drag and drop app builder, where every component is tightly coupled to the backend logic and data,” said Kevin Wu, product marketing lead at Airtable, a nine-year-old San Francisco-based firm that makes cloud-based spreadsheet collaboration software. Airtable on Tuesday launched its own low-code platform, though many of its existing software tools provide similar capabilities, Mr. Wu said.

He said workers outside of IT are already becoming more tech savvy, yet many feel stuck using older apps that weren’t designed for the way they work. With low-code software, Mr Wu said, “they don’t have to be.”

Low- and no-code platforms are at the core of an emerging corporate technology strategy, known as citizen developers or software democratization, that seeks to put software development into the hands of the business-line employees who use the apps. It also aims to free up IT teams for higher-level digital projects.

Global revenue in the low-code application platforms market is expected to reach more than $14 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 26% from 2020 to 2025, according to IT research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.

Roughly 37% of more than 1,800 corporate-technology officials at global companies, polled this year by IT-research firm Forrester Research Inc. said they currently use low-code, no-code or digital process automation tools. Over a quarter said they encourage non-tech employees to do software development work through a low-code citizen developer strategy, the firm said.

Last month, U.S. employers posted more than 360,000 IT job openings, a two-year high, according to IT trade group CompTIA.

Macario Gallegos, senior vice president and chief information officer at Hard Rock Cafe owner Seminole Hard Rock Support Services, said workers in the company’s human resources and finance departments have begun using a low-code platform to build apps that automate the process of gathering data sources, speeding up the task of creating business reports. The platform, he said, makes apps “easier to deploy, easier to configure and can open up a world of do-it-yourself options.”

Todd Florence, CIO of Estes Express Lines

Photo: Estes Express Lines

Office workers at Estes Express Lines, a Virginia-based freight carrier, recently used low-code tools, built by software firm

Pegasystems Inc., to develop an app that routes data and paperwork needed to process refund requests into one place. “We’re not quite at a spot where we have truckers developing apps sitting in their trucks,” said Todd Florence, the company’s chief information officer.

Since launching a citizen-developer program roughly three months ago, Estes’ non-tech workers have created more than half a dozen apps, Mr. Florence said.

Utah Valley University used low-code software to enable outside developers to quickly create a mobile app for incoming students to register for classes, find classrooms and other services through digital tickets.

Troy Martin, a vice president and chief technology officer at the school’s office of information technology, said low-code software made it easier to bring in third-party contract developers, rather than hire new ones. He said it can take four to six months on average to recruit, interview, onboard and train new software engineers. “Whereas it takes less than two weeks to augment existing teams,” he said.

Write to Angus Loten at angus.loten@wsj.com