Data integration company SnapLogic recently announced $2.3M in its first institutional funding from noted venture investors Mike Maples, Jr. and Naval Ravikant. Data integration is going to be a key technology, as enterprises try to make sense of the tidal wave of data that routinely increases in size. Integrating data from legacy structures and the information silos in enterprise SaaS applications is the only way to gain insight, and allow meaningful collaboration.
Mike Maples is a venture investor with a tremendous track record for spotting breakout companies such as Twitter, Digg, and Spiceworks. Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and the co-author of VentureHacks. He co-founded Epinions, and is an investor in Twitter and Disqus. Both were kind enough to take a few minutes to talk about their investment in SnapLogic.
What did you find interesting about SnapLogic that first sparked your interest in investing?
Mike: Roger McNamee introduced me to Gaurav Dhillon over 10 years ago when he was the founder of Informatica. I was also a “rookie” co-founder of an enterprise software startup called Motive, and I really enjoyed getting to know him and sharing war stories about enterprise integration. In more recent years I became an investor and focused on “web 2.0” as well with companies like Twitter, Digg, and Chegg and I started to get a strong sense that web 2.0 was going to have a transformative impact on business software and services. When Gaurav showed me the idea for SnapLogic, it was immediately obvious that he was the first entrepreneur to understand the implications of this changing landscape and the new challenges it would present for integration.
Naval: I’ve worked with Gaurav for a long time – in other investments and he was on the Board of my last company, Vast.com. He’s a phenomenal guy who can take a company from founding to post-public, from enterprise software to consumer Internet. Investing in Gaurav modernizing integration was a no-brainer.
With the real-time nature of today’s enterprise, there is a new area of growth for data integration. What are your thoughts on the size and growth rate of this market segment?
Mike: I think the traditional boundaries between integration “types” i.e. EAI or ETL are a legacy middleware distinction. The business internet (aka cloud computing) is going to create new categories and opportunities – we sure like the DataFLow concept for the new integration! In this model systems can pass the information on their own clock cycle rather than have to bend their business processes to the design of any one vendor’s solution. This approach is more natural for the more loosely connected and flexible architectures that are coming to characterize new approaches to business software and services.
Naval: Integration is a big market and has never been penetrated to more than 20% even by all the vendors combined. 80% of it is developers, consultants and IT staffers are just slinging perl scripts or what have you and that’s a huge market backdrop for SnapLogic.
What is the core business case for the type of data integration that SnapLogic is enabling?
Mike: There are so many opportunities it would be hard to stop at just one! Here is an example: Companies moving to cloud computing can use lighter, internet-style integration to compute quote to cash after a Salesforce install, optimize sales processes when they use Google calendar for their field sales force and even find ways to measure sentiment of their customers on twitter by using the SnapLogic twitter connector to mine the terms they care about in real-time.
Naval: No one company, not even IBM in my opinion, can provide connectivity to the thousands of SaaS/Web applications out there. The SnapStore is a disruptive business innovation that gives vendors and developers a way to create and sell connectivity through “Snaps.” For CIOs and web developers this is a universal connectivity platform.
