Riding the coattails of a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ approach to the enterprise, Belgium startup PieSync offers a platform that connects a plethora of cloud applications and syncs contacts stored in those apps two-way. That’s no mean feat considering the risk of data corruption or overwriting an important contact’s information, which is why, says PieSync, companies are warming to the company’s proposition.
VCs appear to like the product, too, seeing PieSync raise $1.6 million in new funding. The round is being led by Ark Angels Activator Fund and SOFI (PMV). The startup had previous raised a small amount of angel funding as well as going through the Belgian incubator iMind.
“The SaaS space is fragmenting: there are thousands of SaaS applications out there, and a typical SME deploys on average 7-8 different apps. That’s creating a lot of problems to keep data consistent between those different apps,” says PieSync co-founder and CEO Ewout Meyns.
“Also, it’s not easy for individual SaaS companies to solve syncing. It’s technically hard to do it right, and the solution needs to be able to cope with many different data structures and changing API’s, detect changes, match similar contacts (to prevent duplicates), and merge information”.
Meyns concedes, however, that other companies are tackling the same problem, but reckons none are going as far and wide as PieSync. “A lot of SaaS offer integrations with a handful of other SaaS platforms, but no SaaS is interested in offering integrations with hundreds of sometimes overlapping solutions. That makes syncing a perfect pain to solve,” he says.
To that end, PieSync says it’s built technology that allows it to quickly add new platforms with very different data structures, enabling all of the SaaS offerings it supports to talk to one another. “We can add a new solution in a day or two,” says Meyns.
PieSync already supports syncing with 16 apps including Podio, Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Google Contacts, Nimble, OnePageCRM, and SalesForce, to name a few. It says it’s adding more apps each month.
The startup, which charges a monthly subscription for the service, says its typical customers are teams that use multiple cloud applications, but who are struggling to keep contact data synchronised between, for example, a sales platform like SalesForce, a marketing platform like Mailchimp, and contacts stored in an individual’s work Gmail.