Several years ago, Daniil Bratchenko, one of the first employees at DataRobot, the AI and data science platform, observed that enterprises adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps experienced a perennial challenge. Despite the abundance of tools to build integrations between SaaS apps and services, many SaaS apps and services still weren’t playing nicely with each other.“Integrations are a fundamental part of every company’s IT environment,” Bratchenko told TechCrunch in an email interview. “When a company is considering purchasing new software, one of their top priorities is how well the system will integrate with their existing applications … [But] building the hundreds of integrations requested across their customer base takes precious engineering hours away from building core features.”There’s credence to Bratchenko’s claims.A recent survey by Salesforce’s MuleSoft — which isn’t the most impartial source considering that it sells app integration tooling, to be fair — found that nearly 90% of companies find integration with existing systems to be a commonly occurring sales hurdle. Twenty percent of the respondents believe integration to be highly time consuming, while 44% say that they’ve been in a situation where they’ve not been able to integrate apps with existing systems.Given that the average company uses around 130 apps, according to Statista, it’s not difficult to see how the problem can quickly reach an unmanageable — and insurmountable — level.The search for a solution to SaaS app integration led Bratchenko — who’d prior to joining DataRobot sold a company, movie recommendation engine Kionobaza.tv, to Yandex, the Russian technology giant — to found Integration.app, with the goal of helping engineering teams more easily integrate their company’s products with third-party apps.Integration.app today emerged from stealth with $3.5 million in funding led by Crew Capital with participation from Seedcamp and Cortical Ventures, which Bratchenko says will be put toward supporting the startup’s go-to-market efforts, sales and marketing and doubling the size of Integration’s team from 12 full-time employees to 24 within the next 12 months.“The decision to raise equity … enables us to invest upfront in product and sales without having to spend on servicing debt as they build the business,” Bratchenko said. “We also wanted our investors to have the equity incentive early on to be able to be fully invested in the company and be strategic partners — not just a source of capital.”Integration is essentially an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) provider, offering a set of tools to connect both apps and data. There’s a number of vendors competing in the $3.7-billion-plus iPaaS sector, like Digibee, Boomi and the aforementioned MuleSoft — which isn’t surprising factoring in the sheer demand

Integration.app has successfully secured $3.5 million in seed funding!