Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform builder Paragon, which serves enterprise clients, has secured $13 million in a series A round led by Inspired Capital and including prior backers FundersClub and Garuda Ventures. The tranche will be used to “scale” and increase Paragon’s workforce across the technical and go-to-market teams, according to CEO and co-founder Brandon Foo.
The goal of Paragon, a member of Y Combinator’s winter 2020 class, is to enable software integration with third-party apps without interfering with current operations. With capabilities like completely controlled authentication and prebuilt integration interfaces, businesses may use the platform to build SaaS integrations into their products and then give them to their end consumers.
In 2019, Foo and Ishmael Samuel, a former developer for Uber, created Paragon. After launching Polymail, a collaborative email tool, Foo has launched Paragon.
According to Foo, Paragon presently supports 45 prebuilt connectors with SaaS applications, including Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack. Customers may now develop their own unique integrations on Paragon using open SaaS APIs without having to write any code according to a recent rollout by the firm.
Cloud-hosted and on-premises versions of Paragon’s service are both available. So that businesses don’t have to manually establish and maintain authentication for each app integration individually, both store and manage end-user login credentials. Additionally, they both keep integration data for logging and observability needs.
“Software companies must offer integrations in order to stay competitive in the market — it has simply become an expectation of SaaS buyers … However, building integrations from scratch requires tremendous engineering resources — not to mention the work it takes to maintain integrations as SaaS APIs constantly change,” Foo said. “Paragon provides a simple, productized solution that abstracts the complexities of every SaaS integration into a single software development kit, which can be natively embedded in any product to provide a seamless end-user experience.”
“It’s actually been an accelerant for Paragon, since engineering efficiency has become more crucial than ever before. Software companies need to do more with less, yet can’t afford to continue losing valuable deals by not meeting their customers’ integration requirements,” he said. “The top challenge Paragon solves for is engineering resources. To spend in-house engineering resources focused on external integrations takes valuable time away from building their core product.”
