Manifold, a startup known for providing all of the tools developers need in a single marketplace, has decided to make its core product available as a service, so that other companies can build a catalog of related services without a fuss.
Everyone wants to be a platform these days, but creating the infrastructure to offer a set of related services often might not be worth the effort. Beyond developing the actual catalog of services, it requires skills like collecting money and distributing revenue. Most companies don’t have the skill set or resources to set all of that up, and Manifold decided to use its expertise to help out.
Jevon MacDonald, co-founder and CEO, says they set out to build a complete management solution when they released their initial product last year. “The way we do that is by bringing things like billing, a single transaction for a developer, account management, teams and all the sort of things you have to do every time you use a cloud-based service or API.”
They felt the next logical step was to help their customers do something similar within their own ecosystems. “Now we’re here to talk about a Marketplace as a Service, which brings that power to these developer ecosystems directly by integrating with their existing products and platforms to make all the services the developers love to use available no matter where they run the code,” MacDonald explained.
He says that today, companies are really struggling to create marketplaces themselves, and this gives them the ability to do that in a fairly straightforward fashion. “There’s a lot more companies attempting to launch marketplaces, and what we’re hearing from customers is that they’re going back to the drawing board on a lot of these fundamental pieces every time, and this is our bread and butter.”
Manifold’s plan is to make that capability available as an out-of-the-box service to allow anyone who wants to launch a marketplace to do it. The company launched in 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has raised more than $13 million (18.5 million Canadian).