Twenty years into the SaaS era it’s unusual to find a new company tackling a big, universal problem where there aren’t already multiple competing solutions. Yet that’s the case with Flatfile. The Denver-based company is making it simple for any software company to easily ingest data from anywhere, saving developer time on custom scripts and manual data onboarding.
Today we’re announcing Scale’s investment in Flatfile’s Series A funding round.
Beyond the CSV
Enterprises maintain complex webs of software applications that need to import data from other systems. Direct integrations through APIs make it easy to get data in with just a few clicks, but you can only build so many direct integrations. For the rest, enterprises often rely on the lowest common denominator: the CSV file. Anyone who has ever had to deal with CSV imports knows that it’s a slog – getting the data, matching it to a schema, validating the contents of the fields, and so on. When speaking with Flatfile customers, we heard time and time again how time-consuming data onboarding was. One customer in particular saved millions of dollars by reducing a process that took over 60 days via an old custom data importer they built to just a few days by using Flatfile.
Flatfile’s technology is essentially an elegant import button that can be easily dropped into any web application with just a few lines of code. Companies large and small use Flatfile to make it easy to accept data from any third-party application without having to build and maintain a host of individual connectors or having to hack together a custom CSV importer. Companies can just use Flatfile and instantly give their users a clean and crisp data onboarding experience.
The company has two main products:
- Portal provides the functionality behind a software application’s Import button. Portal takes in some data (often a CSV or XLS), makes sure the data is clean, and then sends it into the product. Portal allows businesses to quickly get data into their products without having to spend scarce dev time building and maintaining data importers.
- Concierge is a no-code solution that allows services teams to manage more complex data onboarding projects. With Concierge, you get everything Portal can do plus workflow and collaboration tools. Customers can easily work on data sets together in a structured way instead of resorting to back-and-forth emails and spreadsheets.
Flatfile Makes Enterprise Apps Work Better
Enterprises, middle market companies, and small businesses are all increasing the number of software products they use to run their companies. The complexity and effort required to move data around increases with the number of interconnected applications and entities. And this isn’t specific to software companies — every company that interacts with other companies sends data back and forth –partners, vendors, customers, and so on. Flatfile is the universal translator for long-tail data.
Beyond data integration, Flatfile also improves the user experience and helps ensure that users are set up for success. For both internal applications and customer-facing applications, making sure your users have a good first user experience and quickly getting them to value with their data in your product can be the difference between a successful or churned user. Whether that data is complex in structure or distributed across multiple platforms, Flatfile is the answer.
Just Getting Started
Over time as Flatfile ingests more data, they can begin to use AI/ML to give users smart recommendations for intelligently connecting data between applications. By better understanding the data its products are working with, Flatfile is well-positioned to streamline the movement of any data between any systems. More on that to come.
For now, join us in congratulating co-founders David Boskovic (CEO) and Eric Crane (COO) and the growing team at Flatfile on today’s funding round. We were immediately impressed with the product, the amazing feedback from their customers, the strong momentum since launch, and most of all a special founding team that is delivering real value to their customers. We look forward to working with the company in the years ahead.
Chris Yin contributed to our investment in Flatfile.