Synchronizing projects, tasks, and conversations among work management tools could lead to an enormous productivity boost within an organization. According to an IDC survey, 80% of business leaders report that problems arise because different systems and apps don’t “talk” to each other, while 43% of workers say they regularly have to copy and past or re-key in information.
That’s why Eryk Warren, Grégoire Bois, John Espinoza, and Marc Boscher in 2015 cofounded Unito, a Montréal, Quebec-based startup developing products that integrate disparate software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. This week the company closed a $10.5 million series A financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Mistral Venture Partners, Real Ventures, and Tom Williams, bringing its total raised to nearly $13 million on the heels of a $2 million seed round in May 2018.
CEO Boscher says the capital infusion will enable Unito to expand to other SaaS categories and become something of a “universal translator” for enterprise products. “The average [business] now uses almost 1,500 distinct cloud applications,” he explained. “So we end up spending the majority of our work day bridging information in meetings, messaging, custom integrations, and debates on which tool is the single source of truth.”
Unito purports to solves this with no-code, bidirectional live task and project syncing among tools including (but not limited to) Trello, GitHub, Basecamp, Jira, Asana, Bitbucket, GitLab, and Zendesk. Admins and managers can choose apps they wish to connect and authorize Unito to access them while filtering any of the shared information, and they can map how users, lists, custom fields, and more travel among various tools.
Unito might not be the only workflow automation solutions company on the block — Zapier and SnapLogic are among the segment’s many competing integration platform as a service (iPaaS) providers — but with a healthy customer base that includes HP, The Washington Post, Wix, Landr, and “thousands” of other companies, it’s achieved a measure of success. The startup reports that more than 45,000 people across over 90 countries use Unito, and that 95% report they’re pleased with the services it provides.
“We believe Unito can become a key technology that helps every business to manage the new SaaS reality,” said Bessemer Venture Partners partner Jeremy Levine in a statement. “We’ve been funding SaaS for years now and have witnessed its phenomenal growth. The result is more choices than ever, but also more fragmentation than ever.”
If the current trend holds, the global workplace collaboration market could nearly double to $4.8 billion by 2023, according to Gartner.
