The early-stage College Park-based startup hotglue announced this week $1.5 million in seed funding from Uncommon Capital and angel investors, in a round first reported by TechCrunch. The data integration product allows developers to easily connect customer data from business applications like Salesforce with their own platform. hotglue is embeddable, cloud-based and solves an issue CEO Hassan Syyid says is universally bemoaned in the developer community.
Syyid told Built In he originally got the idea for hotglue while working as an intern building accounting software for revenue recognition.
“There were a lot of issues with pulling Salesforce data and QuickBooks data together, particularly when it came to companies that had a lot of custom data our pipeline couldn’t handle,” Syyid said.
Whenever custom data gummed up the works, the development team would have to go back in and change the entire pipeline just to get a new customer onboarded.
“Eventually, updating our pipeline just became our entire day,” Syyid continued. It wasn’t exactly the glamorous work most developers sign up to work on and a problem he wanted to fix.
Enter CRO David Molot, one of Syyid’s classmates from the University of Maryland. The 20-year-olds both formally dropped out of school earlier this year to focus on hotglue full time, and immediately got to work researching and developing a solution to developers’ data integration problems. At the same time, they were writing blog posts on Medium, not only to explain their concept but also gauge what direction they should take it.
The social response from developers was enough to convince Syyid and Molot there was a market out there for hotglue. While using connectors to pull data from other applications isn’t new, hotglue’s customer base of developers is something that sets them apart from other data integration companies.
In April, Y Combinator accepted hotglue into its Summer ‘21 cohort, and the two have since created 250 connectors based on the open source project Meltano.
Today, the small business has a little over 15 customers and is seeing a 50 percent monthly revenue growth. With the $1.5 million in seed funding, Syyid and Molot plan to bring on a few more engineers to expand what hotglue can offer. In fact, their first new employee starts next week.
