Ampersand, a San Francisco, CA-based developer platform focused on next-gen SaaS interoperability, raised $4.7M in seed funding.
The round was led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels. In addition, angel investors in the round included Arash Ferdowsi (Co-founder, Dropbox), Howie Liu (Founder and CEO, Airtable), Godard Abel (Co-founder and CEO, G2), David Politis (Co-founder and CEO, BetterCloud), Andrew Lee (Co-founder, Firebase), Daniel Lopez (Co-founder, Bitnami), Allison Pickens (Former COO, Gainsight, Current Board member of DBT), Nafis Jamal (Co-founder, MoPub), Merci Grace (Former Head of Growth, Slack), James Donelan (First Mulesoft VPE, Former CTO of Amplitude), Umair Akeel (Former Chief Architect of Marketo), and Product and Eng leaders from Stripe, Databricks, Netapp, Twilio, Shopify, AngelList, other startups.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations, its development efforts and business reach.
Led by Ayan Barua and Lauren Long, Ampersand provides a solution that lets SaaS engineers create scalable, bi-directional integrations with their customers’ SaaS. The developer platform handles everything in the customer-facing integration lifecycle – from development and testing to customer onboarding and support, especially with highly-customized SoRs like Salesforce.
The key components include:
- Config SDK: a config file, through a yaml file, where users define the type of integration, type of data, configuration values available to end users, and how users’d like to connect it to the rest of their stack (via direct connection to their data store, API calls, or both).
- Embeddable UIs: with Ampersand, they can embed set-up, configuration, and management UIs that allow their end users to customize and manage their integrations.
- Managed integration services: their platform tracks each of their customer’s configurations, and makes the appropriate API calls to Systems of Records, while optimizing for cost, handling retries and error message parsing.
- Management Console: the dashboard allows them to monitor and troubleshoot customers’ integrations, and is a place for their customer-facing teams to set up and manage end-user configurations if they prefer to offer white-glove onboarding and support experiences.