Whalesync wants to simplify the process of synchronizing data between SaaS apps
There’s no doubt that no-code tools are changing the way apps are made—especially in the enterprise world, where there’s often a premium placed on technology that can cut costs. According to recent Gartner research, 70% of new business apps will use low-code/no-code technologies by 2025, and by 2024, 80% of non-IT professionals will be developing IT products and services – with over 65% of them at using low code/no code tools.
No-code is a lucrative market, then – and one chock full of suppliers. But Whalesync does its best to stand out from the crowd with a tool that bi-directionally transfers data across popular SaaS apps, including Airtable, Webflow, and Notion.
Whalesync was co-founded about a year ago by Curtis Fonger and Matthew Busel. Fonger, Whalesync’s CEO, began his career at Microsoft working on OneDrive file sync and sold his first startup, a no-code website builder Appetas, to Google in 2014. Busel is a former product manager at MakeSpace and a one-time no-code consultant.
Fonger and Busel met in the spring of 2021 on Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform. They originally planned to build an application builder without code, but after working closely with operators, they discovered a bigger opportunity: data synchronization.
“Users were painfully piecing together data across their SaaS apps and trying to solve the problem with automation tools,” Fonger told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Based on my experience with OneDrive, we realized that teams could unlock new use cases by syncing their apps instead of building one-way data pipelines.”
Whalesync is certainly not the first platform to synchronize data between SaaS apps – far from it. The market for enterprise file synchronization and sharing tools could be worth $12.84 billion by 2026, according to Technavio.
Recent no-code data sync tools on the scene include PieSync, which connects a multitude of cloud apps and syncs contacts stored in those apps bi-directionally. There’s also Airbyte-owned Grouparoo, an open-source platform that synchronizes data between databases and cloud-based tools.
Image credit: Whalesync
Whalesync’s differentiator, according to Fonger, is a spreadsheets that businesses can automatically synchronize their data across SaaS apps and manage it. Users can set up internal tools with Notion and Postgres or build no-code apps with Bubble, for example.
“Whalesync is different from traditional data pipelines or automation tools,” explained Fonger. “We’re conceptually closer to Dropbox, except instead of syncing files across computers, we’re syncing data between SaaS applications. All you have to do is tell Whalesync how to match tables and fields between SaaS apps, so We’ll handle the rest.”
To enable two-way syncing, Whalesync stores the data it keeps in sync, says Fonger. Users can choose to delete this data if they delete their sync configurations or close their account.
Perhaps thanks to the tool’s simplicity, Whalesync was able to gain momentum relatively early after launching in February 2021, signing up hundreds of customers and growing recurring revenue at an average rate of 38% per month. The company recently closed a $1.8 million pre-seed round led by Y Combinator with participation from Liquid 2, Soma Capital and Ascend, signaling at least some investors’ confidence in its approach.
By the end of 2023, Whalesync plans to add another four to five team members to its six-person team.
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of the modern data stack. Large enterprises use extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) and reverse ETL pipelines to move data in and out of data warehouses,” said Fonger. “We’ve learned from these best practices and created new technology to simplify the setup process and bring the power of data synchronization to SMBs, which currently use automation tools to send data between applications.”
