SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parabola, the company that enables everyone to automate their repetitive data tasks, today announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Matrix Partners led the round with participation from Thrive Capital, Elad Gil, additional angels as well as the company’s previous investors. Matrix General Partner Ilya Sukhar joined the company’s board of directors. Funds will be used to hire engineering and design talent to accelerate product development and incorporate new integrations that will make the platform even more powerful for its tens of thousands of users. The company will also focus on delivering rich, easy-to-implement experiences for Parabola’s expanding base of ecommerce customers who need the right tools and applications to grow their businesses as efficiently as possible.
To this end, Parabola also announced its integration with Shopify to help companies not just survive but grow during the COVID-19 pandemic. This integration provides ecommerce businesses the capability to do more with existing resources as they are forced to rapidly adapt to meet increasing demand. It also helps brick and mortar companies bridge operational gaps as they transition to ecommerce.
“What we’ve learned throughout the course of history is that when you provide the right tools, people build amazingly creative and clever solutions,” said Parabola founder and CEO, Alex Yaseen. “While modern technology has the potential to be extremely empowering for everyone, most people don’t have access to the right tools to express their ingenuity. That’s ultimately what we’re working toward at Parabola-- bringing the power of programming to everyone.”
Parabola empowers workers and levels the technology playing field by providing an intuitive, drag-and-drop platform that lets anyone easily build flows that can fully automate their previously manual, repetitive data tasks – no coding required. With simple, logical building blocks, users automate their processes step-by-step, allowing them to move beyond the limitations of a spreadsheet with ease.
“Most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring tons of skilled engineers to build software custom-tailored to their operations,” said Sukhar. “Parabola gives everyday knowledge workers the leverage of an engineer, allowing them to manipulate data and automate processes in the systems that power their business. I'm excited to see how we can unlock more productivity for all."
Shopify Integration Empowers Ecommerce Companies to Maximize Resources to Capitalize on Opportunities
Ecommerce is one sector in particular that has embraced Parabola, particularly in light of its integration with Shopify. Few online retailers were prepared for the tremendous stresses placed on operations when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Since March, shoppers have turned online for the majority of their purchases -- from essentials to comfort items. Ecommerce businesses big and small are experiencing booming demand, forcing them to scale up rapidly while dealing with complex supply chain concerns.
At the same time, companies that have never needed to sell online are being forced to adapt their in-person processes to fit in this new world. For example, there are breweries seeking to sell growlers, restaurants moving to delivery or curbside pickup models and many other segments shifting sales online as they attempt to keep their businesses afloat.
With the emergence of new opportunities and challenges, companies need to streamline operations and increase productivity amid ever-changing realities. Processes have to be nimble, which Shopify and Parabola enable.
Shopify helps anyone to sell online while Parabola now provides the ability for those businesses to automate many of the previously time-intensive operations and marketing tasks they have to solve as they begin to scale. These range from replacing repetitive bulk inventory management tasks to always up-to-date marketing attribution analyses, and Parabola has ready-to-use recipes to get started quickly. Several current customers are already leveraging the Parabola-Shopify integration, including Because Market, Entireworld, Felix Gray, Kennedy Blue, Local Porter, Logitech, Mollusk Surf Shop, Note Cosmetics, Reckitt Benckiser, Superplastic, UMZU, UPS, Volcom and more.
“I have been a happy Parabola customer for a long time, and when the Parabola team told me they developed a new Shopify integration I was super excited,” said Reid Sheldon, Head of Digital Marketing at Volcom. “I'm a marketer, and I love the empowerment that Parabola provides me to be able to work with data without having to involve IT or Dev Ops."
"Parabola has been our light in the dark,” noted Robert Walker, VP of Growth at UMZU. “In ecommerce, there are a million things going on at once and a thousand different platforms to use. Parabola has given us the opportunity to quickly access the data from all of these platforms and bring that data together to help us form important business decisions. With a small team, it can be hard to find the time to develop and write code. With Parabola, we went from 0 to 100 in a week. No code needed, no developer or data scientist hired, just quick access to all of the information we required."
To find out more about how Parabola can help you, please visit www.parabola.io.
About Parabola
Parabola is a drag-and-drop productivity tool that brings the power of programming to everyone. With a library of customizable, prebuilt steps, people use Parabola to automate their previously manual, repetitive data tasks with an easy, step-by-step approach. Parabola is backed by Matrix Partners, Thrive Capital, AngelPad, Merus Capital, Abstract Ventures, and individual investors. It is headquartered in San Francisco. To learn more, please visit www.parabola.io.
