SnapLogic Archives

Cloud services and the adoption of apps that rely on them are continue to grow in popularity, but a persistent theme in enterprise technology has been that a lot of organizations still continue to use legacy software and architectures, for reasons of cost, migration headaches and simply because sometimes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t benefit from a better way of integrating some of those workflows, and better leveraging the data coming out of those different apps, and today a startup that’s built a service to help them do that has raised a growth round of funding.

Snaplogic, which has built an integration platform that lets enterprises bring in and integrate both legacy and cloud apps to better monitor them and let them work together, has closed $72 million in growth financing, money that it will be using to expand its business globally. According to analysis from PitchBook, this latest funding comes at a $260 million pre-money valuation, which would work out to about $372 million post-money. We are checking with Snaplogic to see if it can confirm those numbers directly.

This latest round, which brings the total raised by Snaplogic to $208 million, is being led by growth equity VC Arrowroot Capital, with participation also from Golub Capital and existing investors. Past investors are an illustrious group that has included a mix of financial and strategic backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Vitruvian (which led its previous round), Capital One, Ignition Parnters, Microsoft, and a number of others.

The company is not disclosing how big its customer base is currently. In its last round in 2016, it had grown to 700 enterprises, adding 300 in just one year, which was an especially big amount of growth. Current customers feature a number of big names like Adobe, Verizon (which owns TechCrunch), AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Emirates, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Sony, and Wendy’s. It describes the bigger integration market as a $30 billion opportunity.

The defining characteristic in that list is that these are businesses that pre-date the big cloud revolution, and so they are more likely than not grappling with a mix of new and legacy apps that need to be balanced against one another, brought together in some instances to work together, and harnessed in terms of their data to help in a company’s wider efforts around big data for projects in areas like application integration, data integration, API management, B2B integration and data engineering.

“This is an exciting time for SnapLogic,” said Gaurav Dhillon, CEO at SnapLogic, in a statement. “We’re extremely proud to have built a modern and innovative solution that is solving really hard problems for our enterprise customers. This latest investment is a testament to the hard work and ongoing support of our customers, partners, and employees around the world. Together, we’ll continue to chart the way forward, making integration even faster and easier so enterprises can realize their data-driven ambitions.”

There has been an interesting wave of startups that have emerged specifically to tackle the opportunity of providing tools to businesses that are still using old kit and older software to give them the ability to take advantage of new innovations in computing and how to use their bigger pool of data. Others include Workato (which itself has raised money in the last year), MuleSoft (now a part of Salesforce), and Microsoft itself, and in that context, Snaplogic has been taking a very measured approach in how it raises capital and expands.

“Our approach is to do successive up rounds with straightforward terms rather than chase a big slug with onerous terms,” CEO Guarav Dhillon told TechCrunch once. He’s a repeat entrepreneur and has a track record of conservative but sound growth. “We built Informatica with just $13.5 million, so my approach is to raise funds as needed.”

It’s an approach that is resonating with investors. “SnapLogic is attacking a huge and surging market opportunity with a uniquely modern and powerful platform,” said Matthew Safaii, Founder and Managing Partner at Arrowroot Capital, in a statement. “They’ve built an amazing product, work with an impressive roster of customers, and are led by an experienced executive team. As SnapLogic sets its sights on continued product leadership and global expansion, we look forward to partnering with them to help get their pioneering integration platform into the hands of even more enterprises around the globe.”

“SnapLogic is reinventing application and data integration for the modern era,” said Robert Sverbilov, Director at Golub Capital, added. “We are excited to support SnapLogic’s next generation SaaS application integration platform and to help secure its footing as a leader in the iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) vertical.”

By Ingrid Lunden

Workato, a startup that offers an integration and automation platform for businesses that competes with the likes of MuleSoft, SnapLogic and Microsoft’s Logic Apps, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow and Workday Ventures. Combined with its previous rounds, the company has now received investments from some of the largest SaaS players, including Salesforce, which participated in an earlier round.

At its core, Workato’s service isn’t that different from other integration services (you can think of them as IFTTT for the enterprise), in that it helps you to connect disparate systems and services, set up triggers to kick off certain actions (if somebody signs a contract on DocuSign, send a message to Slack and create an invoice). Like its competitors, it connects to virtually any SaaS tool that a company would use, no matter whether that’s Marketo and Salesforce, or Slack and Twitter. And like some of its competitors, all of this can be done with a drag-and-drop interface.

What’s different, Workato founder and CEO Vijay Tella tells me, is that the service was built for business users, not IT admins. “Other enterprise integration platforms require people who are technical to build and manage them,” he said. “With the explosion in SaaS with lines of business buying them — the IT team gets backlogged with the various integration needs. Further, they are not able to handle all the workflow automation needs that businesses require to streamline and innovate on the operations.”

Battery Ventures’ general partner Neeraj Agrawal also echoed this. “As we’ve all seen, the number of SaaS applications run by companies is growing at a very rapid clip,” he said. “This has created a huge need to engage team members with less technical skill-sets in integrating all these applications. These types of users are closer to the actual business workflows that are ripe for automation, and we found Workato’s ability to empower everyday business users super compelling.”

Tella also stressed that Workato makes extensive use of AI/ML to make building integrations and automations easier. The company calls this Recipe Q. “Leveraging the tens of billions of events processed, hundreds of millions of metadata elements inspected and hundreds of thousands of automations that people have built on our platform — we leverage ML to guide users to build the most effective integration/automation by recommending next steps as they build these automations,” he explained. “It recommends the next set of actions to take, fields to map, auto-validates mappings, etc. The great thing with this is that as people build more automations — it learns from them and continues to make the automation smarter.”

The AI/ML system also handles errors and offers features like sentiment analysis to analyze emails and detect their intent, with the ability to route them depending on the results of that analysis.

As part of today’s announcement, the company is also launching a new AI-enabled feature: Automation Editions for sales, marketing and HR (with editions for finance and support coming in the future). The idea here is to give those departments a kit with pre-built workflows that helps them to get started with the service without having to bring in IT.

By Frederic Lardinois

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Snaplogic raises $72M more for its enterprise data integration platform