SnapLogic is a generative integration platform for faster and easier digital transformation. Pulse 2.0 interviewed SnapLogic founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon to learn more about the company.
Gaurav Dhillon’s Background
What is Gaurav Dhillon’s background? Dhillon said:
“My background is in building technology companies with a vision and value proposition that promises simpler, faster, and more cost-effective ways to integrate data and applications for improved decision-making and better business outcomes.”
“In 2006, I co-founded SnapLogic, provided seed capital, and have served as the company’s chairman and CEO since its inception. Prior to that, I was Chief Executive Officer at Informatica, which I co-founded in 1992 and helped systematically grow from a startup idea to a leading software enterprise with customers and operations around the world. As the chief executive, I led Informatica through its initial launch, successful initial public offering (IPO), and expansion into Europe and Asia.”
Formation Of SnapLogic
How did the idea for SnapLogic come together? Dhillon shared:
“Due to my past experience in the integration space, I spotted the opportunities the cloud and AI would bring very early on, and I believe this is the future of not only SnapLogic but the entire integration industry.”
“When cloud technology entered the scene I was inspired to found SnapLogic. I recognized enterprises needed an integration platform born in the cloud and purpose-built for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. In addition to being able to manage complexity, the market needed a unified platform for integrations across data sources and applications that were born in the cloud.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Dhillon’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Dhillon reflected:
“Without a doubt, SnapLogic’s early entry to applying AI to enterprise integration has been a particular high point. Being the first to market with industry’s first AI-powered integration platform back in 2017, there is so much untapped potential still to achieve with our customers. We created a BHAG for 2030 that came true in mid-2023, first with SnapGPT and now as we experience a virtuous cycle in the enterprise software world with our AgentCreator (formally known as GenAI App Builder). The addition of these solutions on top of our already robust app and data integration platform has proven to be not only a (recent) favorite memory, but an exciting glimpse of what’s to come.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dhillon explained:
“SnapLogic’s generative integration solution gives companies a competitive advantage in innovation, creating data-driven decision-making and seamlessly connecting diverse systems and data sources by empowering any employee to create new integrations just by using natural language.”
“SnapLogic was the first to market with a generative integration solution, launching SnapGPT in August 2023 after many years of AI investment and seven years after SnapLogic launched the first AI-powered integration assistant, called Iris, in 2017. SnapGPT is designed to empower everyone — not just IT professionals — to integrate their applications and data sources using natural language, automate business processes, and orchestrate data flows across the enterprise.”
“Our latest product offering, AgentCreator, transforms the landscape of LLM-based solutions by empowering lines of business, from finance to marketing to HR, to craft powerful generative AI solutions within hours. This eliminates the need to rely on experienced Python coders who would previously spend days and weeks building the same solution. AgentCreator enables enterprises to rapidly create LLM-powered agents and builds on SnapLogic’s former GenAI App Builder solution by combining data and app integration with generative AI to automate complex workflows and enhance business processes. By leveraging natural language prompts and seamlessly connecting diverse data sources, global businesses stand to save millions and accelerate their LLM projects tenfold.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Dhillon and the team faced in building the company? Dhillon acknowledged:
“Identifying and implementing a return to office philosophy that both recognizes the virtues of remote work and distributed teams, while also embracing the immeasurable value of in person interactions, collaboration, and team-building has been more of a challenge than I predicted. While we quickly – and to some extent easily – adapted to remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, it has been more difficult for our industry as a whole to determine the right balance of virtual, face-to-face, and hybrid work environments.”
Evolution Of SnapLogic’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Dhillon noted:
“When enterprise IT companies were increasingly migrating to the cloud, I recognized the need for a software integration company that connects both cloud-based and on-premise solutions.”
“Today, SnapLogic is designed to meet the integration needs of the modern enterprise. With a natural language interface that leverages the latest generative AI capabilities, IT and business users can quickly and easily create integrations to drive business value, derive rich insights from data, and confidently improve customer experience in their applications and services.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dhillon cited:
“SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and achieved Series A funding in 2009 from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Maples Investments. In October 2010, the company achieved its Series B with a $10 million raise led by Andreessen Horowitz. At this stage, SnapLogic led the market by creating the world’s first online integration store, providing its customers with pre-built connectors that accelerated their ability to quickly and easily build integrations between applications and data sources. In June 2013, SnapLogic launched elastic integration through two major releases that drastically simplified enterprise data and application integration in the cloud, in data centers behind firewalls, and between the two.”
“In May 2017, SnapLogic delivered the industry’s first AI-powered integration assistant, also known as Iris, anticipating the AI boom years before ChatGPT took the world by storm. The company then launched new automation capabilities in 2021 to further empower non-technical users and accelerate the flow of data through the enterprise. The following year in 2022, SnapLogic achieved one of its most significant milestones to date – reaching a $1B valuation after a round led by Sixth Street Growth to accelerate its leadership in AI-powered data and application integration. In 2023, the company launched the world’s first generative integration solution with SnapGPT and continued to accelerate its market lead for AI-powered integration through the launch of AgentCreator earlier this year in October.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Dhillon about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“It’s clear that our customers — and prospective customers — are most excited about how to leverage SnapLogic to bring AI chatter out of the break room and into their core business objectives. Enterprises know that connecting their data is the key to unlocking the potential of generative AI and it starts with integration.”
“The response to SnapGPT, the world’s first generative integration solution that we launched last year, has been tremendous. Here are a few brief customer comments on the value they’re seeing:
– David Patterson, Head of Solutions and Delivery, Hampshire Trust Bank (HTB): ‘SnapGPT was one of the easiest AI use cases to pitch internally. After positive feedback from the senior team, we’re now fully embedding SnapGPT into our processes. Before SnapGPT, we’d effectively become victims of our own success, as with SnapLogic’s technology, our integration speed and efficiency set very high expectations internally. SnapGPT does practically 80% of the heavy lifting for us, meaning we can continue to meet those high expectations without needing to expand our headcount.’
– Nancy Mustachio, Director of Enterprise Applications at Barnard College: ‘Our team of developers has used SnapGPT to create and test integration workflows in under an hour, compared to days. I foresee SnapGPT will continue to advance and be able to handle more complex integrations. We’re excited to be at the forefront.’”
“After we launched AgentCreator earlier this year and received immediate positive feedback from our customers, it was apparent that the market was hungry for this type of solution. This affirmed our strategic direction that generative integration is the future and is key for accelerating GenAI adoption across enterprises. Here are a couple examples of how this solution is already changing the game for our customers:
– A leading global provider of automated test and assurance solutions for networks, cybersecurity, and positioning chose SnapLogic’s AgentCreator to bring GenAI to their enterprise. They will use AgentCreator to develop a new application for processing competitive insights, enabling faster reactions to market changes. Additionally, they will create applications for their Salesforce Knowledge Base and HR system to gain faster access to customer and business insights.
– A top European language and content solutions provider plans to use AgentCreator to improve and speed up their translation services. By creating a GenAI translation application, they can deliver product descriptions in multiple languages within seconds, eliminating the need for manual translation by hired translators. This tool will also help refine their targeting and achieve better keyword alignment and cultural context accuracy. Eventually, they aim to offer this as a self-service solution on their end-user platforms and as an API-access solution.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dhillon assessed:
“A significant portion of our customers rely on SnapLogic for legacy modernization; that is, upgrading outdated integration systems that overwhelmingly contribute to enterprise technical debt with our cloud-native integration platform further enhanced by Generative AI. According to The Wall Street Journal, it would cost over a trillion and a half dollars to fix all technical debt woes, and we see legacy modernization initiatives as a significant part of that market.”
“Further, McKinsey estimates up to $4.4 trillion in added value across industries given ‘generative AI’s impact on productivity.’ The majority of use cases examined in McKinsey’s research span customer operations, sales, marketing, engineering, and R&D, and we see parallels with many of our own generative integration use cases.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dhillon affirmed:
“SnapLogic is the first generative integration platform that continuously unlocks the value of data across the modern enterprise at unprecedented speed and scale. With the ability to build cutting-edge GenAI applications in just hours — without writing code — along with SnapGPT, the first and most advanced generative AI-powered integration co-pilot, organizations can vastly accelerate business value. Other competitors’ GenAI capabilities are lacking or nonexistent. And unlike much of the competition, SnapLogic was born in the cloud to be purpose-built to manage the complexities of cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments.”
“SnapLogic offers iterative development features, including automated validation and schema-on-read, which empower teams to finish projects faster. These features enable more integrators of varying skill levels to get up and running quickly versus our competition that mostly require highly skilled developers, which can slow down implementation significantly. SnapLogic is a highly performant platform that processes over 4 trillion docs monthly and can efficiently move data to data lakes and warehouses, while some competitors lack support for real-time integration and cannot support hybrid environments.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Dhillon concluded:
“Our overarching goal is to do to the integration market what Apple did to the mobile phone market, by being a one-stop shop (or in the case of the iPhone, a single device) that meets a broad range of customer needs. SnapLogic has always set out to serve as a single, unified, and go-to platform for enterprises and will continue to enable customers to reach better business outcomes faster and easier and, now, with the added benefits of applying generative AI to an already robust integration platform.”
