A $62B Market Built for Developer Teams to Own

01 /The Concept

Prismatic is a developer platform for cloud-based B2B software companies. It gives them the infrastructure to embed deep integration capabilities directly into their product – letting their customers connect it with whatever other cloud tools they already use.

The platform ships with ready-made connectors for a wide range of popular cloud services. When a developer needs something more specific – a connector to a customer's internal system, for instance – Prismatic's API and component library make it straightforward to build one.

But a connector is just one piece of the puzzle. In practice, enterprise customers don't just need two systems to talk to each other – they need to build full integration workflows: sequences of data exchanges, conditional logic, branching actions triggered by specific events.

With Prismatic, customers can build those workflows themselves – no developer required. A non-technical employee can assemble integrations using a visual editor, dragging the relevant connectors into the right sequence. No code, no IT ticket, no waiting.

When something breaks – whether during setup or in routine operation – Prismatic surfaces a full log of all data exchanges so the problem can be pinpointed quickly. And because that debugging can also be done by the customer's own staff, the support burden on the SaaS vendor's team drops considerably.

Prismatic has been steadily acquiring customers and sustaining strong growth momentum, which is reflected in its investment trajectory: $3.3M in spring 2021, $9M in early 2023, and now $22M – a year after that previous round.

02 /Why It Matters

Every company is becoming a software company, whether it wants to or not. The tools stack keeps growing. A MuleSoft study found that organizations of meaningful size were running an average of 1,061 applications in 2023 – up from 976 the year before.

Each application handles a slice of the business. But what companies actually need is to automate full processes that span multiple applications. 80% of companies surveyed said that the single biggest obstacle to digitizing their workflows was the need to integrate those applications with one another.

The result: of the 1,000+ applications in use at a typical enterprise, only 29% are actually integrated into business processes. The rest sit in silos.

This gap spawned its own market category: iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service. It covers both standalone integration layers and embedded solutions – like Prismatic – that let SaaS vendors bake integration capabilities directly into their products.

The market is growing fast. iPaaS was worth $5.3B in 2021 and is projected to reach $61.7B by 2030.

Several strong players have emerged, a few of which have been [covered previously](/review/bez-jetogo-uzhe-ne-prodat): WorkOS raised $95M total (including an $80M round in 2022). Paragon, covered around the same time, raised $16.5M. Merge – [reviewed in spring 2021](/review/integracija-cherez-odno-mesto) when it raised a $4.5M seed – followed with $15M, then $55M. Finch, [covered in early 2023](/review/zolotaja-integracija), focuses exclusively on HR platform integrations and has raised $62.1M. Digibee, not covered here, quietly built to $99.3M raised.

What's striking is that Prismatic's founder didn't set out to build an integration platform. He was building a B2B SaaS product and ended up constructing roughly 600 custom connectors just to satisfy enterprise customer demands. At some point, the connectors had consumed the roadmap. So he stopped, and built a startup around the problem itself.

The same origin story keeps appearing across this space. The founder of WorkOS was building an email client (Nylas) and discovered that selling to enterprises required integration depth he didn't have. The founder of Paragon built another email client (Polymail) and hit the same wall. The founder of Finch was selling an employee lending product and found he couldn't close deals because his product lacked integrations with the HR systems his prospects used.

In other words, the integration market is invisible until you're inside it – you don't see the problem clearly until you've tried to sell enterprise software and discovered, mid-pitch, that you're missing integrations with a thousand other tools.

03 /Opportunities

Developers have a well-known tendency to build technically beautiful platforms for problems that don't exist. The integration market is the mirror image of that trap: the demand is enormous, obvious to anyone who's tried to sell enterprise software, and growing fast enough that there's still plenty of space.

Given that the iPaaS market is expected to 10x over the next few years, this is a strong opportunity for technically-oriented teams. The problem is well-defined, the potential customer base is large, and the infrastructure need is persistent.

That said, AI is already reaching into this space. Integration development is inherently repetitive work – exactly the kind of task that's ripe for automation. Integration.app has built an AI-native integration platform claiming it can compress development time from weeks to hours.

The underlying principles of building integration platforms are shifting. Anyone entering this space now should factor that in – because the competitive baseline is already moving.