Former executives at Seattle e-commerce software startup Fabric, including co-founder Ryan Bartley, are leading a new company coming out of stealth mode this week.
Seattle-based Canopy revealed a $4 million seed round and its gameplan to help companies get a better grip on their data integrations.
Founded last year, Canopy describes itself as a “data composability platform” that aims to give developers an easier and more efficient way to integrate and manage data with front-end applications, replacing clunky custom code with its software.
Canopy is initially focused on e-commerce companies but says its technology can be used in various verticals. The startup also hopes to ride tailwinds from an increasing amount of data being used by companies, particularly with the recent AI boom.
While he was helping build Fabric, which reached a $1.5 billion valuation last year, Bartley said he ran into data integration problems that Canopy is now trying to solve.
Existing providers help companies move data, including “ELT” (Extract, Load, Transform) providers such as Fivetran and Airbyte. But not many focus on moving data immediately for a front-end application, according to Bartley.
Canopy also offers observability tools similar to New Relic or Splunk but at a lower price point and with “out-of-the-box” usability, Bartley said.
Canopy is working with “design partners” to refine its platform and has more than 300 enterprise customers ready to be onboarded. The company has 11 employees.
San Francisco firms Kindred Ventures and Village Global — which is backed by Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and others — invested in the seed round.
“Solving the data integration and activation problem for companies is a holy grail in enterprise technology,” Steve Jang, founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, said in a statement. “Companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on data integration and several multi-billion dollar product categories have emerged over the last few years to try to make this easier. None of this works for most companies.”
Fabric, which raised $140 million last year, offers behind-the-scenes technology used by retailers and business-to-business brands for various aspects of online commerce.
Bartley said Canopy is taking a “pragmatic” approach to growth compared to his “blitzscaling” experience with Fabric.
“We know the order of operations, we know what kind of landmines are there, and which ones not to step in,” he said.Before launching Fabric, Bartley was a general manager and mobile director at Staples, and held managerial roles at eBay, Dell, and Rackspace.
Canopy co-founder Morgan Dollard also worked at Fabric, as senior vice president of product management. He previously led engineering teams at Google, Microsoft, and Juniper Networks.
