One of the many advantages of today’s digital world is the ability to bridge people and systems across the globe. As more software businesses build solutions that connect to the ever-growing SaaS ecosystem, Paragon wants to help make their jobs easier. The LA-based company announced a $13 million Series A round this week to improve the developer experience.
Paragon’s solution works to streamline the process of building and maintaining SaaS integrations, like Salesforce, Slack or Jira. Software developers that buy these products are tasked with ensuring the software is soundly integrated with their existing systems, a process that has historically required costly engineering investments, according to the company. Paragon offers a software development kit and integration infrastructure that helps companies build, maintain and scale their product integrations in a faster, more cost-effective way.
The company was founded in 2019 by software development veterans Brandon Foo and Ishmael Samuel. While working to build Foo’s previous company Polymail, the pair devoted several months learning the ins and outs of various authentication methods, APIs and documentation for specific SaaS providers every time they built a new integration. As customers consistently requested more integrations, maintaining them all grew to be nearly impossible.
“We later realized that this is a problem that every SaaS company faces today,” Foo, Paragon’s CEO, told Built In via email. “In the past five years, the software ecosystem has grown by almost 10 times, and the average organization uses hundreds of different SaaS applications. In order for this ‘future of work’ to actually work, software products cannot exist in a silo — they must be able to integrate seamlessly with the other apps that their customers use.”
Inspired Capital led the Series A round, which will help Paragon continue developing its solution. In addition to growing the 45 pre-built app integrations it currently supports, Paragon will include a custom integration builder. This tool will allow customers to build their own connector with any API, according to Foo. The platform will also expand into new integration categories like employee resource planning, HR and advertising.
“With the funding from our Series A, we’ll continue to invest in making Paragon the best solution for developers building product integrations,” Foo said. “As the software ecosystem continues to grow, our vision is that Paragon will become the connecting layer for all software. Just as Plaid has made it unnecessary for any company to build their own banking integrations, we believe that in the next few years, no company will ever need to build or maintain their own integrations because of Paragon.”
While striving to achieve this goal, Paragon is in the midst of building out its 25-person team. The company plans to reach a headcount of 40 by the end of this year and is hiring across its engineering and go-to-market teams.
