A startup dreamt up within HubSpot on Monday announced $3.1 million in Series A funding and commercially launched new software for better cloud data syncing.
The Boston startup, Bedrock Data, has four founders, and three of them come out of HubSpot. The Cambridge inbound marketing software firm is also an early customer for Bedrock Data.
CEO and co-founder John Marcus said the idea stemmed from a problem he and his co-founders were encountering within HubSpot, in which it was difficult to keep data in sync across numerous cloud applications, such as marketing automation, email, ticketing and CRM. Data quickly becomes duplicated, conflicting or outdated across different applications.
Founded in 2012, Bedrock Data has developed a new approach to automatically syncing data; rather than having two cloud applications connect to each other to sync data, all applications connect to Bedrock Data as the core and sync their data from there. This sort of approach “hasn’t been done to date” by competitors in the space, Marcus said. The system also doesn’t require any developers or consultants to work, and plans start at $149 a month.
The fact that the system can be implemented quickly could actually turn out to be a challenge for Bedrock Data, Marcus said. “Many businesses think this should be a consulting-based service—they think their business processes are too complex to distill down,” he said. “We’re trying to bring a message that is very clear—that this does not have to be hard, that it’s very achievable.”
Here are more key details:
Founders. Along with Marcus, founders Ben Smith (VP of product) and Adrian Mott (VP of marketing) were formerly at HubSpot. The fourth founder, VP of engineering Taylor Barstow, was formerly with Workflow by Design.
Funding. The $3.1 million Series A round was actually closed at the end of 2014, and includes a $1 million seed round that the company had raised previously. The round was led by .406 Ventures, and also included Boston Syndicates and Maiden Lane. Other backers include Visible Measures CEO/founder Brian Shin.
Customers. Along with HubSpot, other customers so far include Marketo, Eventbrite, Bigcommerce and Contactually.
Competitors. Existing data integration players that Bedrock Data is competing with include Informatica (a formerly public company that was just taken private), Boomi (owned by Dell) and Cast Iron Systems (owned by IBM).
Employees. Bedrock Data has 15 full-time employees at its office near South Station.
Advisors. The company’s board of advisors includes Shin, HubSpot chief information officer Jim O’Neill, Doug Levin (founder of Black Duck Software and CEO of Quant5) and Jeanne Hopkins, CMO of Continuum.
