One of the huge challenges companies like enterprise SaaS vendors face with new customers is getting customer data into their service. It’s a problem that Flatfile founders faced firsthand in their jobs, and they decided to solve it. Today, the company announced a healthy $7.6 million seed investment to expand on that vision.
The company also announced the release of its latest product, called Concierge.
Two Sigma Ventures led the investment, with participation from previous investors Afore Capital, Designer Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund).
Company CEO David Boskovic says he and co-founder Eric Crane recognized that this is a problem just about every company faces. Let’s say you sign up for a CRM tool like HubSpot (which is a Flatfile customer). Your first step is to get your customer data into the new service.
As Boskovic points out, if you have thousands of existing customers that can be a real problem, often involving days or even weeks to prepare the data, depending on the size of your customer base. It typically includes importing your data from an existing source, then manually moving it to an Excel spreadsheet.
“What we’re trying to solve for at Flatfile is automating that entire process. You can drop in any data that you have and get it into a new product, and what that solves from a market perspective is the speed of adopting new software,” Boskovic told TechCrunch.
Image Credit: Flatfile
He says they have automated the process to the point it usually takes just a few minutes to process the data, If there are problems that Flatfile can’t solve, it presents the issue to the user who can fix it and move on.
The founders realized that not every use case is going to involve a simple one-to-one data transfer, so they created their new product called Concierge to help companies manage more complex data integration scenarios for their customers.
“What we do is we provide a bridge between disparate data formats that are a little bit more complex and let our customers collaborate with their new customers that they are onboarding to bring the data to the right state to use it in the new system,” Boskovic explained.
Whatever they are doing, it seems to be working. The company launched in 2018 and today has 160 customers with 300 sitting on a waiting list. It has increased that customer count by 5x since the beginning of the year in the middle of a pandemic.
Any product that reduces labor and increases efficiency and collaboration in a digital context is going to get the attention of customers right now, and Flatfile is seeing a huge spike in interest in spite of the current economy. “We’re helping onboard customers quickly and more efficiently. And our Concierge service can also help reduce in-person touch points by reducing this long, typical data onboarding process,” Boskovic said.
The company has not had to change the way it has worked because of the pandemic, as it has been a distributed workforce from day one. In fact, Boskovic is in Denver and co-founder Eric Crane is based in Atlanta. The startup currently has 14 employees, but plans to fill at least 10 roles this year.
“We’ve got a pretty aggressive hiring map. Our pipeline is bigger than we can handle from a sales perspective,” he said. That means they will be looking to fill sales, marketing and product jobs.