West L.A.-based Paragon, an integration platform for software as a service apps, announced $13 million in funding in a Series A round led by Inspired Capital with participation from previous investors FundersClub, Garuda Ventures and Jude Gomila, bringing the company’s total funding to $16.5 million.
The company was founded in 2019 by Brandon Foo and Ishmael Samuel, who saw a need for developers to have an avenue that would make the integration of technological resources like Salesforce, Slack or Hubspot less complicated and more cost-effective.
Paragon offers developers a kit that helps companies build and maintain their product integrations in a faster, more cost-effective way. In a blog post, Foo wrote that the company’s vision is to do for SaaS integrations what Plaid, a financial services company, had done for banking integrations.
“With the funding from our Series A, we’ll continue to invest in making Paragon the best solution for developers building product integrations. We aim to provide the most powerful, flexible developer experience through our SDK and APIs… Additionally, we’re investing in expanding our integration catalog rapidly to support the needs of our growing customer base,” Foo wrote. “As the software ecosystem grows, we envision Paragon as the connective layer for all software. Just as Plaid has made it virtually inconceivable for any company to build their banking integrations, we believe no company will ever have to develop or maintain their own SaaS integrations again because of Paragon.”
The additional funding will help the company to continue developing its solutions and further grow the 45 software systems it currently supports, like QuickBooks and Microsoft Teams. Paragon says it will include a custom integration builder that will allow customers to build their own connector with any API and expand into new integration categories like advertising. According to Built In LA, the company is hiring across multiple areas and is planning to grow its team to 40 people.
