- INTERNAL — a new no-code SaaS tool for rapidly deploying a company’s internal console — announced it raised $5 million
INTERNAL — a new no-code SaaS tool for rapidly deploying a company’s internal console — announced it recently launched to enable employees to interact with customer app data in a secure and compliant interface. And the company also revealed that it raised $5 million in a seed round of funding led by Craft Ventures with participation from Pathfinder (Founders Fund’s early-stage investment vehicle) along with several other angel investors.
INTERNAL is essentially fixing the “God View” problem that plagues a number of companies. For example, Facebook, Uber, and Snap were scrutinized for their “God View” tools that were abused by employees to spy on users.
The “God View” tools that are built in-house at most tech companies provide employees with broad access to sensitive customer information — which are generally required to do their jobs like fixing issues, responding to support cases, and completing tasks. INTERNAL’s out-of-the-box internal tools are necessary for customer-facing teams to interact with app data while controlling access and protecting customer privacy to fix the “God View” problem.
INTERNAL was founded by Arisa Amano and Bob Remeika. The founding members of the company have worked together at 3 technology companies in the past including Harbor, Zenefits, and Yammer.
“Most companies end up hacking together mediocre tools with no controls to prevent employees from abusing customer data,” said Amano in a statement. “This is a real problem that tech companies are obligated to fix but most of them will never dedicate their own engineering resources to do it right. We created INTERNAL so companies don’t have to build these tools in the first place. They can be up and running in minutes with better tools for their employees to get work done, that also helps protect customer privacy.”
How does INTERNAL work? INTERNAL connects to existing databases and allows customer-facing teams to deep dive into individual records without lengthy implementation time or engineering work. And INTERNAL integrates with business applications such as Google Sheets, Salesforce, and Zendesk (deep linking related records to create powerful views of the customer).
“The dirty little secret in Silicon Valley is that an alarming number of employees at tech companies can access your information,” added Remeika. “These companies don’t have bad intentions, but they’re always faced with a choice: build customer-facing products or better internal tools. With our software you don’t need to choose anymore.”
Every piece of data on INTERNAL is protected with granular access controls and audit logs to ensure employees only access the data they need, when they need to. These data protection features are also necessary for companies to meet the core requirements of GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
“The talented INTERNAL team spun out of Harbor earlier this year and we are excited to be one of their first customers,” explained Harbor CEO Joshua Stein. “Partnering with INTERNAL allows us to free up engineering resources and focus on accelerating our business. INTERNAL provides a robust system for managing customer operations tasks with important security and compliance controls for protecting customer data.”
INTERNAL’s key product features include: 1.) Powerful database browser 2.) Search and filtering 3.) Auto-generated tasks and team queues 4.) Edit mode 5.) Custom views 6.) Granular permissioning on every field 7.) Redacted fields for sensitive data and 8.) Audit logs on every record
“The need to control employee access to customer data, while also allowing them to do their jobs servicing those customers, is a huge problem,” noted Craft Ventures co-founder and partner David O. Sacks — who is also known as the founder and former CEO of Yammer (acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012). “In the same way that SaaS tools emerged to deploy internal dashboards, a new breed of SaaS tools are emerging to deploying internal consoles. Arisa and Bob have identified a clear market need and we are excited to invest in their new startup.”
