### The King is dead, long live the King The SaaS world is in for an absolute upheaval this decade. The old guards, like SAP, Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, Oracle, and others who pioneered Systems of Record (SoR), may have been kings of the hill for a long time, but they'd better watch their backs. A new breed of innovators is storming the castle. In the past decade, business software workflows experienced a tectonic shift thanks to the emergence of Systems of Engagement (SoE) SaaS. We're talking about trailblazers like Gong, Outreach, Notion, Amplitude, Rippling, Zoom, Slack and thousands of others. These SoEs are often built on top of one or more SoRs, abstracting them away as passive databases. As AI becomes ubiquitous, the SoEs at the forefront of this evolution will craft a breathtaking new world where business software is not just intelligent—it's practically alive, brimming with untapped potential and infinite possibilities. The recent innovations built on GPT-4 gave us a glimpse of what is to come. ### SaaS Interoperability With the ascent of SoE SaaS, there is a need for infinitely more complex integration infrastructure to ensure better interoperability among products, allowing customers to gain the additive (if not multiplicative) value of their SaaS stack. Countless software engineers are working at SoE SaaS companies with the primary goal of building robust integrations with other SaaS products so that they can meet the expectations of their customers. Incumbent SoRs – like Salesforce, HubSpot, Workday, NetSuite, and Marketo – are heavily configured and customized, so engineering teams at SoEs must reverse engineer customer-specific configuration each time. Monitoring the health of these pipes remains a big challenge. Unfortunately, customers are usually the first to experience these problems when integration pipes break. This doesn't just impact software engineers. For Go-to-Market teams, deals don’t close until new integrations are supported. Low integration reliability impacts customer retention, and support teams are reliant on the whims and fancies of third-party APIs and changes in the customer environments. ### Ampersand lets SaaS engineers create robust, scalable, and bi-directional integrations with their customers’ SaaS Introducing [Ampersand](https://www.withampersand.com/). Our solution is a batteries-included developer platform that handles everything in the customer-facing integration lifecycle - from development and testing to customer onboarding and support, especially with highly-customized SoRs like Salesforce. Ampersand has a Terraform-like declarative user interface and leverages a configuration-first approach which enables SaaS engineers to create robust, customer-configurable, and scalable user-facing integrations in a fraction of the time. #### We’re unveiling alongside $4.7M in seed funding led by Matrix Partners Today we’re announcing $4.7M in seed funding led by Matrix Partners. We’re excited to work with Patrick Malatack and Kojo Osei, who share our vision of SaaS interoperability. Other participants in the round include Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels. Angel investors in the round include 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; Board Member, DBT), Nafis Jamal (Co-founder, MoPub), Merci Grace (Former Head of Growth, Slack), James Donelan (Former VPE, Mulesoft; Former CDO, Amplitude), Umair Akeel (Former Chief Architect, Marketo), Sha Ma (Former VPE, GitHub) and product and engineering leaders from Stripe, Databricks, NetApp, Twilio, Shopify, AngelList, other startups. ### The Genesis I faced the SaaS interoperability problem for several years at Siftery, the last company I co-founded, and then again as the VPE at G2 while building Track, an SoE for the SaaS Spend and Vendor Management use case - a SaaS category I helped create. Our engineering teams had to burn the midnight oil while learning poorly-documented and inconsistent APIs, handling esoteric configurations of customers' CRMs and ERPs, troubleshooting brittle syncs, and setting up test environments without access to production-like datasets. We built a lot of internal tooling to solve this, which distracted us from working on our core product roadmap. My co-founder Lauren witnessed the integration challenge through her experience building, launching, and growing Firebase Extensions - a platform of packaged solutions that developers primarily used to integrate their Firebase apps with 3P APIs. The product hit a nerve with developers (billions of executions per month), and Lauren realized that user-facing integrations are an even bigger pain point. We were separately working on the idea for Ampersand when we met last year. Our shared vision, overlapping insights, and passion for this space prompted us to go on this (hopefully long) journey together, and help usher in a new generation of AI-native SaaS products that will be much better at communicating with each other.  ### The Journey Ahead We have been quietly working with select early partners and are excited to launch our [developer docs]( https://docs.withampersand.com) today. Please check it out and let us know if you have any feedback on the core tenets of the platform. If you are building Salesforce and HubSpot integrations, we are expanding our Early Access Program (EAP) to more companies. If you are interested in learning more about our EAP or just want to jam with us about SaaS interoperability or why Salesforce has so many APIs, please drop us a note at chat@withampersand.com, or request access here. We look forward to hearing from you and building with you.
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