April 17, 2023
SaaS Interoperability
Over the last decade there has been a shift from systems of record (SoR) to systems of engagement (SoE). SoRs, like Salesforce and Oracle, provide an authoritative source of information, processing and storing data across many different teams and departments. SoEs, like Notion and Slack, abstract away those SoRs as databases by providing integrations and interfaces to update information within an SoR without needing to directly use it.
Engineers experience countless roadblocks trying to maintain those integrations. They are often brittle, unscalable, or require customization for larger customers.
With the ascent of SoE SaaS, there is a need for infinitely more complex integration infrastructure to ensure better interoperability among products, allowing customers to gain the additive (if not multiplicative) value of their SaaS stack. Countless software engineers are working at SoE SaaS companies with the primary goal of building robust integrations with other SaaS products so that they can meet the expectations of their customers.
Incumbent SoRs – like Salesforce, HubSpot, Workday, NetSuite, and Marketo – are heavily configured and customized, so engineering teams at SoEs must reverse engineer customer-specific configuration each time. Monitoring the health of these pipes remains a big challenge. Unfortunately, customers are usually the first to experience these problems when integration pipes break.
Introducing Ampersand: interoperability for the next generation of SaaS, Ampersand
Funding
Axle, a universal API for insurance, raised $4m in Seed funding.
Ampersand, developer platform for SaaS companies creating user-facing integrations, raised $4.7m in Seed funding.
DBeaver, universal database management tool, raised $6m in Seed funding.
Brassica, an API-based investment infrastructure for alternative assets, raised $8m in Seed funding.
Otterize, a platform for implementing intent-based access control (IBAC) for workloads, raised $11.5m in Seed funding.
Sei, an open-source Layer 1 blockchain specialized for trading, raised $30m in funding.