Pandium enables B2B SaaS companies to build, launch, and promote native software integrations, all inside an easy-to-use platform. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Pandium CEO and founder Cristina Flaschen.
Cristina Flaschen’s Background
What is Flaschen’s background? Flaschen said:
“I’ve spent 15+ years leading technical implementation & sales engineering for enterprise software companies.”
Formation Of Pandium
How did the idea for Pandium come together? Flaschen shared:
“I spent over a decade of my career being forced to use bad tools to build integrations. It was like living in a recurring nightmare.”
“Company leaders would create KPIs around building integrations for users but didn’t want to allocate a budget to build them from scratch in-house. Instead, we tried to use all of the then ‘best-in-breed’ iPaaS tools and found that they just didn’t work.”
“The platforms were expensive. We spent months trying to learn how to use them. And in the end, they never worked properly anyway.”
“As soon as we had a unique use case, these tools completely broke down, and we had to bring in an engineer to code a workaround. And I can tell you that virtually all engineers hate using those low-code things. We used to call code review “art class” because it was basically reviewing endless screens of shapes and arrows to try to discern something that could be built with a few lines of Python.”
“The systems got bloated and overly complicated very quickly. The integrations were like a house of cards. One tiny issue and the entire infrastructure could come crashing down.”
“I got fed up.”
“So, we built Pandium based on a code-first philosophy. We automate the repetitive and time-consuming parts of building and maintaining integrations with code, but give teams the freedom to program custom and scalable configurations and launch at scale.”
Core Products
What are Pandium’s core products and features? Flaschen explained:
“Pandium gives B2B SaaS companies all the infrastructure they need to build, launch, and promote user-facing product integrations. The platform handles the repetitive and time-consuming parts of integration development, freeing up engineering teams and saving companies six figures per integration on average.”
“Pandium’s connectors allow our customers to connect to any API or system. They handle authentication while serving as a secure gateway to any API, giving you access to all its endpoints out of the box. The Integration Hub provides the infrastructure and development tools needed to rapidly code highly custom and reusable integrations while handling logging and hosting. The platform’s built-in release channels make launching and managing integrations at scale a breeze and has enabled Pandium users to launch integrations up to 6x faster than they could from scratch.”
“The platform’s In-App Marketplace enables B2B SaaS companies to build and launch a fully hosted app marketplace in under one week, allowing their customers to discover and install integrations directly within their application.”
“Our newest feature, the Integration Development Kit, now supports engineers in building integrations with code even faster. With a click of a button in Pandium, they can program up to 90% of their integration’s business logic. It’s the latest step in our mission to enable faster development of integrations while maintaining a code-first approach and preserving all flexibility of writing an integration from scratch.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Flaschen faced in building the company? Flaschen acknowledged:
“A common challenge in our space is SaaS leaders not understanding the opportunity integrations and technology partnerships offer their organizations. Most B2B software companies leave money on the table by not investing in building integrations.”
“80% of SaaS buyers say their #1 buying criteria is the ability to integrate with their existing tech. Yet the majority of software companies offer no integrations, hack something together with Zapier, or refer customers to build things themselves.”
“We spend a lot of time educating executives about how integrations help them unlock revenue for their organizations. We also have a ton of content to help educate partner leaders about strategies to advocate for themselves and win support inside their organizations to build the integrations they need to succeed in their roles.”
Evolution Of Pandium’s Technology
How has Pandium’s technology evolved since launching? Flaschen noted:
“Our tech has grown and evolved to keep up with the needs of our customers based on market feedback. My co-founder and I are deeply customer-centric and love working on highly requested or widely adopted integrations. We focus on building features that make building and launching integrations at scale using code a reality for our customers. We have spent a lot of time talking to prospects and customers to see what they really want.”
“Those conversations and innovations in generative AI led us to launch the Pandium Integration Development Kit (IDK), which allows engineers to set up 90% of an integration instantly.”
“The IDK is a complete tool kit for integration development. It includes With a click of a button in Pandium, engineers get the following populated into their repository:
Pre-built code for standard integration development tasks delivered directly into the user’s repository in their language of choice.
Access to a library of API clients, including automatic handling of authentication, paging, rate limiting, logging, and CRUD operations.
Context-aware code completion with insights into the APIs users are integrating with.
LLM-generated field mappings for the specific systems our customers are integrating (in beta).”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Pandium’s most significant milestones? Flaschen cited:
“Our acceptance into Techstars honestly changed the trajectory of our business. We needed help fundraising and access to executives at B2B SaaS companies for customer discovery and to help refine our ICP and messaging. The program delivered on both of those goals — launching the marketplace into production.”
“Another significant milestone that comes to mind is around platform adoption. I vividly remember the day a few years back when we surpassed 1,000 monthly active connections. It felt like such a *big number. We are far beyond that today, but there was something special about knowing that Pandium touched over a thousand businesses on a regular basis.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Flaschen about customer success stories, she highlighted:
“ShipBob is the leading eCommerce fulfillment service for DTC businesses. Before becoming a Pandium customer, integration development was a major challenge for them. Each integration cost them $50-75K and took several months to stand up.”
“Once they started using Pandium, they reduced their engineering costs by over 70% and were able to launch integrations 6x faster.”
“According to ShipBob’s Senior Director of Platform Partnerships:
‘Pandium helped us integrate into the newest leading e-commerce channels. Within less than a year, we had 100+ merchants live and processed millions of orders. It happened in such a short time. That would not have been possible without Pandium. We would not have been able to move that quickly and launch partnerships of this scale without Pandium’s role in our strategy.’
‘To us, Pandium is not a vendor but a true partner. We’re leveraging Pandium to execute on some of our very big strategic goals and it’s a collaborative effort. Pandium is an important part of how we think about achieving those goals.’”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Flaschen assessed:
“There are approximately 30,000 SaaS companies worldwide. But 70% of them are not integrated.”
“That’s 21,000 companies missing out on opportunities to increase revenue, lower churn, and give customers a better user experience because they don’t offer product integrations.”
“Plus, there’s an integration opportunity with the launch of every new piece of software, so even the 30% that are currently integrated in some way will need to expand their offering to stay current. We see them as ideal customers as well.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Pandium from its competition? Flaschen affirmed:
“Pandium’s code-first approach means users can connect to any app and create completely custom data flows.”
“No-code integration builders limit their customers. Since they rely on pre-built configuration options, integrations created with them often break or are reliant on the third-party for updating functionality when faced with complex data flows or unique use cases. If you’re a company that relies on your integrations for business critical functions, you can’t have that sort of uncertainty. It’s too risky.”
“Companies who purchase these tools try to bring in engineers to program custom options, but once your technical team is forced to write code, it’s no longer a ‘no-code’ tool.”
“Instead, Pandium takes an entirely different approach. Our platform automates about 90% of the integration build and maintenance but leaves the last 10% to our customers’ engineers so they can code their custom business logic. This means our customers have complete control over how their data flows. We don’t trap them into predetermined configurations that don’t work for their use cases.”
“Pandium’s release channels and the reusable nature of integrations built with Pandium make launching and maintaining integrations at scale a fast and smooth process.”
“And because of how our platform is built, programming the last 10% of an integration is fast and simple. We’re language and repository agnostic, so customers can use their current tech stack. And we recently launched an Integration Development Kit (IDK) to make builds even faster. The kit includes pre-built integration scaffolding, API client libraries, and context-aware code completion.”
“Integrations that would take months to build from scratch can be launched in days or weeks using Pandium.”
Future Goals
What are some of Pandium’s future company goals? Flaschen concluded:
“Generative AI presents incredible opportunities to accelerate software development across the board, including when it comes to integration development. Pandium is uniquely positioned to train AI models because we have thousands of examples of successful integrations running on our platform. This data, in combination with our true focus as a developer platform, creates an ideal foundation to train AI models, which will help developers build more apps faster, even if those apps don’t necessarily look like the integrations we focus on today. Stay tuned!”
