Grouparoo Raises $3M Seed Round

We are excited to announce that Grouparoo has raised $3M in seed funding to make SaaS integrations easier for engineering.

This round was led by Eniac Ventures and Fuel Capital. We’re also honored and humbled to have great participants in the round including Hack VC, Liquid2, SCM Advisors, Stacy Brown-Philpot, J Zac Stein, Meka Asonye, Jonathan Grant, and others with experience that will be helpful in our journey.

It all started about a year ago when Andy, Evan, and I got together to catch up. We had all worked together at TaskRabbit for a number of years, but it had been awhile since we had a chance to catch up. In our conversation, we concluded that while our paths had diverged, we were experiencing similar pain points in our roles. In particular, data and how it is accessed and leveraged throughout an organization was a common thread of frustration for our product teams. We had confronted the same challenges around defining key pieces of data and using it in external tools, especially when other teams outside of the product organization were involved.

Grouparoo was born out of that conversation. We were three product leaders that were tired of saying “no” to data enablement requests because it’s a messy business that, to be frank, engineers prefer not to work on. We set out to discover a tool that would make us more than happy to get to “yes” to the constant requests we were getting from other teams.

While engineering teams have gotten good over the years at storing and generating data about their customers, it’s rare that this data is leveraged to its full potential in external applications.

Tools like Marketo, Zendesk, and HubSpot can be very effective but are only as good as the data that powers them. The data exists in a product database or data warehouse but often gets locked in there. Marketing and operations teams beg for help, but it’s too hard to integrate and iterate. As a result, everyone gets frustrated.

When we thought about how we could get to “yes” more, we decided an open source approach had the potential to solve this problem in a way that worked for everyone.

Grouparoo is an open source data framework, built to easily sync customer data from your data warehouse to all of your 3rd-party tools such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, and Intercom.

Here’s how it works: you define what data is important about each customer, make groups (auto-updating cohorts) that use these properties, and sync this data using integrations that are already tested and ready to go.

We’ve seen initial integration times go from weeks to minutes with this model. Each new tool only gets easier to integrate after that.

It’s also a huge organizational win when marketing and operations teams can easily update data themselves. With Grouparoo, they now can have the autonomy to get what they need without depending on the technical teams. And the engineers can focus on the core product.

Because Grouparoo is open-source, you can maintain control over your data and infrastructure. You are never locked in to SaaS providers and you can keep more data in-house, aiding in privacy and compliance efforts.

We set out to empower teams to make great customer experiences, driven by data. We are happy to share what we have built and accomplished so far, but we’re at the very start of that journey.

We will use our new funding to grow the Grouparoo community and build out the team. If you want to build open source data tools that make data reliable, accessible, and actionable, we would love to chat with you.