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Paragon, which builds a platform that integrates and integrates various software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for enterprise customers, has raised $13 million in a series round led by Inspeed Capital, along with previous investors FundersClub and Garuda Ventures. CEO and co-founder Brandon Foe said the distribution is aimed at “running” and expanding Paragon’s team in engineering and go-to-market teams.
Part of Y Combinator’s winter 2020 cohort, Paragon is designed to enable software products to integrate with third-party applications without disrupting existing workflows. Companies can use the platform to build SaaS integrations into their products and then provide them to their end users, with features such as fully managed authentication and pre-built integration interfaces.
Fo co-founded Paragon in 2019 with former Uber engineer Ismail Samuel. Paragon is Fu’s second venture after Polymail, a collaboration-focused email app.
While building PolyMail, we had to spend months becoming experts in various vendor-specific authentication methods, APIs, and integrations for each one we built. We felt like we were constantly reinventing the wheel. However, our customers keep asking for more integrations, making it impossible to keep up quickly, let alone maintain all the integrations we’ve built,” Fo told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Later, I realized that this is a problem that every SaaS company faces today. When Ishmael and I started Paragon, we wanted to solve a never-ending problem that we faced ourselves as software developers.
According to Fo, Paragon currently supports about 45 integrations with SaaS applications, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack and Shopify. The company recently launched an integration builder that allows customers to create their own custom integrations on Paragon with public SaaS APIs without having to write code.
Image Credits: Paragon
Paragon offers two versions of its service: cloud-hosted and on-premises. It both stores and manages end-user authentication credentials so that companies don’t have to build and authenticate each application integration separately. Both store integration data for logging and monitoring purposes.
“Software companies need to offer integrations to stay competitive in the market – they’ve simply become the expectation of SaaS buyers … However, building integrations from scratch requires a tremendous amount of engineering resources – not to mention the work it takes to maintain integrations like SaaS APIs constantly changing,” said Fo. Paragon offers a simple and scalable solution that encapsulates the complexity of every SaaS integration into a single software development kit, which can be integrated into any product to deliver a seamless end-user experience.”
Fo says Paragon is currently fielding about 100 million inquiries per month on its customers. That’s a good start, but the challenge will be to sustain growth as competing products emerge. When not fighting Exactly A similar problem is that Pipedream provides an integration platform for building workflows and connecting cloud applications and services. Looking at financial applications, Stripe recently launched App Marketplace, a collection of scripts and tools that include third-party SaaS applications that work with Stripe’s payment processing.
But Fo says the tech slowdown is unexpectedly fortunate (minus the layoffs).
It was fast for Paragon as engineering efficiency became more critical than ever. “Software companies need to do more with less, but they can’t continue to lose important deals by not meeting their customers’ integration requirements,” he said. “The biggest challenge Paragon faces is engineering resources. Spending in-house engineering resources on external integration takes significant time away from building their core product.”
To date, Paragon has raised $16.5 million in capital.
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