Repeat Canadian technology entrepreneurs Roy Pereira and Alexey Adamsky have teamed up with former colleagues to help software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies launch new application programming interface (API) integrations with Unified.to.
The Toronto startup has closed $1.1 million CAD in pre-seed funding to make it easier for SaaS clients—especially ones developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions—to access the integrations they need to power AI bots, predictive analytics, automation, and other use-cases via its unified API software platform.
Unified.to is led by Pereira as CEO and Adamsky as CTO. The pair is familiar with the challenges associated with building API integrations. Most of Unified’s seven-person team previously worked together at two other Toronto tech startups that Pereira founded, led, and exited: adtech business Shiny Ads, which was bought by Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project in 2014, and AI scheduling assistant CalendarHero, which was purchased by Saskatoon software firm Vendasta in 2021.
“We built everything that a SaaS company needs to add [API] integrations once, and they can do this in an afternoon.”
Roy Pereira, Unified.to
Adamsky previously founded Toronto software development company Three Red Cubes and data analysis platform SimplyInsight, which was acquired by CalendarHero in 2017. Unified.to is Pereira’s fifth startup. “Every company that I’ve ever started, we’ve always had to build API integrations into other SaaS apps … We’ve wasted so much time and money building and then maintaining [these API integrations],” Pereira told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
Enter Unified.to, which has developed a platform that offers hundreds of pre-built API integrations, giving other business-to-business (B2B) software firms access to the real-time and normalized customer data they require to fuel their applications without the associated development burden.
“We built everything that a SaaS company needs to add [API] integrations once, and they can do this in an afternoon—it’s literally that quick,” Pereira claimed.
Unified.to’s pre-seed round, which closed this month and was raised via simple agreement for future equity, marks its first external funding to date. It was co-led by Hootsuite co-founder Ryan Holmes’ LOI Venture, a Vancouver-based venture capital (VC) firm focused on young entrepreneurs, and Montréal’s Developer Capital (DevCap), a new AI-focused VC fund born out of software development consultancy Monadical.
“I came across this problem quite a bit during my Hootsuite days so I got excited when I first saw them demo the product,” Holmes told BetaKit. “The issue Unified is tackling is a major headache for a lot of companies. Years ago, there was no platform for B2B SaaS developers to easily add third-party integrations, so after hearing about the traction Roy and Alexey were having at Unified we were compelled to get on board.”
“The problem space Unified is solving for was a big source of headaches for me during my time building Hootsuite,” Holmes told BetaKit. “A decade ago, there was no platform enabling B2B SaaS developers to add third-party integrations into their applications, which made it a pain to access customers’ data in other platforms.”
Unified.to’s financing was supported by a slew of American investors, including Techstars, Alumni Ventures, Gurtin Ventures, and Baker Street Ventures, plus eleven tech leader angels, including Kevin Kliman, co-founder and CEO of Toronto human resources tech startup Humi.
“Humi is a customer, and Kevin was so impressed with what his engineering team was telling him about our product that he came in and invested,” Pereira said. Unified.to claims it helped Humi save $1 million in integration development costs, enabling the company to add 25 human resources information system integrations in just one month.
For DevCap, Unified.to marks one of its first investments to date. Launched last year, DevCap relies on Monadical’s team of developers to help source, vet, and support the startups it backs.
“While conducting our technical due diligence of Unified.to, we were impressed by the clarity of thought that went into the abstractions used and the code base,” DevCap CEO Jordan Steiner said in a statement. “This was evident in the impressive velocity with which a small team managed to ship over 200 API integrations.”
Steiner added that Unified.to is addressing a pain point that Monadical has seen within its own client base for many years, noting that customer research revealed that Unified.to users viewed the startup’s solution as both a revenue driving and cost savings tool.
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Pereira said that while B2B SaaS companies have needed API integrations to build interconnected solutions for some time now, the biggest use case Unified.to has seen over the past six months has been SaaS firms using AI, which requires data.
Pereira and Adamsky launched Unified.to back in April 2023 amid particularly challenging VC fundraising market conditions. “[It was] the worst time to open a company because there’s no investors,” Pereira said.
“2023 was just dead,” Pereira added. “Nobody was picking up … I have two previous exits, I have a ton of experience, my co-founder had tons of experience. We built an amazing team that’s all worked together, and it was [still] very, very hard to fundraise, and we had to go through a ton of investors to find the right ones.”
This required Unified.to to be capital-efficient, serving as a “forcing function” to stay lean and automate more of their operations, Pereira said. Today, he claimed that the startup leverages quite a lot of AI internally.
“This is part of our secret sauce. This is why we’re so lean.”
Feature image courtesy Unified.to.