It seems that nowadays, IT teams are juggling an overwhelming number of tools, apps, and systems. According to Statista, the average company was utilizing a staggering 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps in 2022. This abundance is impacting productivity, as 80% of companies reported in a MuleSoft poll that integration challenges are slowing down their organization-wide efforts. This leads to data silos and disconnected departments.
“We built around 600 integrations to customers’ other software. It was absolutely necessary, but became a significant burden and eventually ate up over half of our R&D capacity,” explained Michael Zuercher, founder of Zuercher Technologies, a public safety agency software provider, about his firsthand experience with the SaaS app integration headache.
Zuercher recognized the complexity and burden of integrations while bootstrapping his first startup. And he is not alone in his struggles; software companies face a unique and unsolved problem when it comes to app integrations.
One potential solution is integration platform as a service (iPaaS), a cloud-based service that helps organizations unify their apps, processes, and data from a single interface.
- The iPaaS market is worth $3.47 billion and is expected to reach over $9 billion by 2025.
- In 2021, a survey found that 66% of corporations plan to invest in iPaaS to address data integration and automation challenges.
There are plenty of iPaaS options available, including Integration.app, which uses AI models to reconcile different apps and services; Digibee, a startup that recently raised $60 million in funding; and Amazon’s newly launched AWS AppFabric.
However, Michael Zuercher believed he could — and still believes he can — provide a better solution.
Thus, he co-founded Prismatic in 2019 with Beth Harwood and Justin Hipple, with the goal of helping business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies effortlessly connect their products to other third-party software already in use by their customers. Their platform offers a low-code integration designer, a native development environment, a management console, and a marketplace for customers to toggle and configure integrations. Recently, they also launched an integration designer and expanded API connectors to cater to developers’ needs.
“SaaS companies are spending huge amounts of time and resources on integrations,” said Zuercher. “Prismatic reduces that burden by making it easy for SaaS companies to build, deploy, and manage integrations at scale, and embed them in their products for their customers to self-serve.”
The company’s client base includes startups and Fortune 100 companies, and they achieved annual recurring revenue growth throughout 2023.
To further their growth, Prismatic just closed a funding round of $22 million, led by Five Elms Capital, today. This brings their total raised to $29 million, and the new funds will go towards expanding their ~50-person team, enhancing R&D, and improving their existing tools and software.
“Prismatic’s exceptional growth since their Series A, achieved in less than a year, solidifies the crucial role of embedded iPaaS in B2B SaaS companies,” said Austin Gideon, principal at Five Elms Capital. “We’re seeing high demand across our portfolio of B2B software companies for a platform like Prismatic to augment integration capabilities. Scaling software companies can see significant returns on investment by utilizing Prismatic’s platform, allowing their teams to stay focused on delivering new products to customers. We’re excited to partner with this exceptional team again for the Series B and continue to make advancements in the future of SaaS.”
