IT teams today must handle a vast number of tools, applications and systems. The average company was using 130 software as a service (SaaS) applications by 2022, according to Statista — a volume that affects productivity. Eighty percent of companies answering in a recent MuleSoft survey reported that application integration challenges are slowing down their efforts across the organization, leading to data silos and disconnected departments.
Michael Zuercher says he experienced the SaaS application integration headache firsthand while launching his first startup, Zuercher Technologies, a public safety software provider.
“We built about 600 integrations into other customer software. It was absolutely necessary, but it became a significant burden and ultimately consumed over half of our R&D capacity,” Zuercher told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Throughout this time, we realized that integrations remained a complex, unique and largely unsolved problem for software companies.”
One solution is what’s known as an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), a type of cloud-based service that helps organizations connect and integrate their applications, processes and data through a single pane of glass.
The iPaaS market is well established at this point, having are created Revenue of $3.47 billion in 2020 will surpass $9 billion by 2025. And companies have embraced iPaaS. a overview by 2021 it found that 66% of companies will invest in iPaaS to address data integration and automation challenges.
iPaaS startups and established offerings abound. Some include Integration.app, which uses artificial intelligence models to reconcile different apps and services. Digibee, which recently raised $60 million in venture capital. and Amazon’s recently released AWS AppFabric.
However, Zuercher believed he could – and still believes he can – do better.
Today, Zuercher leads the way Prismatic, an iPaaS startup that designs a solution to help Business-to-Business (B2B) SaaS companies connect their products to the other products their customers are already using. Zuercher co-founded Prismatic with Beth Harwood and Justin Hipple in 2019 with the goal of streamlining application integration development to enable SaaS companies to more easily connect with third-party software.
Prismatic’s platform offers tools to connect applications through integrations and hooks from a single dashboard.
“SaaS companies spend enormous amounts of time and resources on integrations,” Zuercher said. “Prismatic reduces that burden by helping SaaS companies easily build integrations, deploy and manage those integrations at scale, and integrate them into their solutions so their customers can self-serve.”
Prismatic offers a low-code integration designer, a native development environment, a management console, and a marketplace where customers can change and configure integrations. The platform recently released an integration designer and expanded new API connections, “doubling down” on developer-focused functionality, Zuercher says.
“We built Prismatic from the ground up to serve SaaS companies – not businesses building internal integrations – so features that SaaS companies need, such as developer-centric tools, client-specific configuration, version control, integration and scalability were included from day one” , Zuercher said. “Prismatic’s embedded iPaaS provides a way for SaaS vendors to provide powerful integrations as a native part of their products, reducing the burden of integration on IT departments.”
Zuercher did not disclose exactly how many customers Prismatic currently has. However, it said the client makeup ranges from startups to Fortune 100 companies and that it has driven annual recurring revenue growth through 2023.
In a possibly optimistic sign, Prismatic just today closed a funding round — a $22 million Series B — led by Five Elms Capital, the Kansas City-based equity developer. Bringing Prismatic’s total raised to $29 million, the new cash will go toward growing the startup’s ~50-person team, expanding R&D, and enhancing Prismatic’s existing tools and software.
Prismatic’s integration marketplace, which aims to simplify the process of connecting applications to each other.
“We decided to raise equity to capitalize on the growth we saw in 2023 — a time when many SaaS companies took a step back,” Zuercher said. “In 2023, we saw strong, consistent growth throughout the year. We are more confident than ever that our product is making an impact on B2B SaaS teams, and this funding will accelerate and expand our efforts.”
“Prismatic’s stellar growth from its Series A, achieved in less than a year, has solidified the indispensable role of embedded iPaaS in B2B SaaS companies,” added Austin Gideon, principal at Five Elms Capital, in a canned statement. “We are seeing strong demand across our portfolio of B2B software companies for a platform that will help increase integration capabilities. Scaling software companies are able to achieve strong ROI using Prismatic’s platform, allowing teams to stay focused on delivering new products to customers. Working with this team again for Series B gives us the opportunity to make significant advancements and improvements in the future of SaaS.”
