Pipedream Closes $20M Series A

We are excited to share that we have raised $20M in Series A financing led by True Ventures with participation from CRV, Felicis Ventures, World Innovation Lab and over 20 prominent angel investors, CEOs, and founders.

In 2019, we launched Pipedream with the goal of developing an integration and compute platform purpose-built for developers.

Why? A large percentage of software is glue code to integrate one API with another. This code has massive business value, but no one likes writing it.

We felt this pain personally at our last company, BrightRoll. We built an entire team of engineers just to build and manage integrations outside of our core data engineering team. By the time we sold the company, we had duplicated our team in size and infrastructure, and built 176 data pipelines that we had to run and maintain.

There had to be a better way.

When you build an automation or integrate a few cloud services, AWS or Google Cloud are normally overkill. You don’t want to manage infrastructure or cloud resources just to run glue code.

On the other end, tools like Zapier or Make/Integromat offer simple no code solutions, but they limit your ability to handle custom logic, and they are not designed for their customers to operate at internet scale. No developer wants to be limited by a drag and-drop, configuration based tool that limits their flexibility. They just want to write code.

We launched a minimum viable product and started collecting feedback. There was so much we didn’t know:

• What developers would find our solution most compelling?
• How could we reach those developers efficiently?
• What use cases would be solved?
• Would teams and/or enterprises be willing to pay for this product?

Over the past 2.5 years, we have answered most of these questions.

Developers Love Pipedream

First, we want to say thank you to the over 300,000 developers who signed up and used Pipedream. We deeply appreciate your product feedback, the integrations you contributed, the time you spent in customer interviews, your social media posts, and everything you did to improve and promote Pipedream. We would not be here without you, and we are grateful to have such a helpful community.

Since our launch, customers like Brex, Checkr, and Scale AI have used Pipedream to build internal tools, unblock revenue, integrate with partners, and power automations that make their teams more efficient.

“For Scale, Pipedream allows our engineering team to focus on the meaningful parts of integration building and skip all the repetitive bits such as custom authentication, deployments, and logging,” says Shaun VanWeelden, Head of Field Engineering at Scale AI. “With Pipedream, we are testing, developing and running business critical workflows that enable us to both unblock revenue and be more efficient as an organization.”

In addition, we are adding more than 600 new developers every day, all with no money spent on marketing. All user signups are organic and all paid plans are self-service, as we do not have any employees focused on go to market activities.

Our customers tell us consistently that they love the code-level control when they need it, and the built-in, no code integrations when they don't. Our active user chart demonstrates that once a customer gets an automation up and running, they rarely leave.

In addition, our customers are operating at internet scale. Since launch, they’ve processed more than 5 billion events across 500,000 workflows, and have consumed over 70 years of compute time.

Pipedream Loves Developers

Our purpose as a company is to help developers be 10x more productive. We believe helping developers to be more productive is how we can have the greatest impact on the world.

To date, we have been exclusively focused on improving the product and our community has given us clear feedback on how  to make the product more powerful, easier to use, and more consistent with natural software development practices.

This feedback manifested in the recent release of Pipedream 2.0: the culmination of nearly a year of work. We completely re-imagined the product and released major new features, including:

• Multi-language support including Node, Python, Golang, and Bash
• Data Stores to store and retrieve data across steps & workflows
• Open source triggers and actions for 700+ applications
• Improved workflow builder to test and iterate without impacting live workflows
• Multiple triggers are now supported per workflow

While we are proud of what we have built to date, we know there is so much more to do.

We are currently working on our GitHub integration which will let developers manage workflow definitions as code. Think Terraform or CDK for app integrations. If you are interested in early access, sign up here.

We also want to improve workflow orchestration (including branching, looping and the handling of automatic retries) and launch key enterprise features (including SOC2 and better role based access controls). We will be sharing more information about these initiatives soon.

Lastly,  this financing ensures our ability to continue to support individual developers and our robust Developer tier with up to 10,000 monthly invocations available for free. We believe low volume workflows can still provide tremendous value and we want to encourage developers to build those workflows on Pipedream.

Together, we can Integrate the Internet

Software would be easier to write, and developers would be more productive, if all applications on the internet worked together seamlessly. While many hypothesized this was a “pipedream,” it is becoming more of a reality on our platform every day.

Pipedream already has over 700 integrated applications, and thousands of triggers and actions into our marketplace. Not surprisingly, the ten most popular integrations are all household names: Airtable, Discord, GitHub, Google Sheets, Slack, Telegram, Twilio, Twitter, and YouTube.

All integrations are all open source and exist in our registry on GitHub so they can be updated or modified by any developer. In fact, many of these integrations were requested and/or developed by members of the Pipedream community.

Perhaps most exciting is that the pace of new integrations is accelerating.

Our open and extensible platform solves two problems: First, any user, customer or partner can add an integration to our open source registry, enabling Pipedream to support far more integrations than any closed-source integration platform. Second, developers can extend the platform with proprietary or internal integrations that solve their individual use cases and are not intended to be used by the broader Pipedream community.

Additionally, we’re tapping our community to find the talent we need to continue to build our product and fulfill our vision. The majority of the employees who have joined our team have been existing Pipedream users.  And, as a fully remote company, we can hire developers anywhere in the world and we are doing just that. We now have employees in California, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Final Words

Thank you to all our users, employees and our investors. We know that we can’t build this product and company without your support, and we look forward to continuing to work tirelessly to build Pipedream into the future.

It’s time to integrate the internet. If you agree, join us!