SaaS startup Hookdeck has raised $2.65 million CAD ($2.1 million USD) in seed financing as it continues to support its customers with its webhook infrastructure. Webhooks are used to communicate the occurrence of an event in one system to another system, and they often share data about the event.
Webhooks are most common in SaaS platforms like GitHub, Shopify, Stripe, Twilio, and Slack because they support different types of events based on the activities that happen within them.
Webhooks allow for multiple apps to automatically communicate with each other. Zapier, a California-based automation tech startup, explained that webhooks work similarly with SMS notifications. When a customer opens up a bank account, they provide the institution with their phone number to get updates about any activity in their account. Any new purchases or urgent messages will be automatically sent to their phone using the number that they provided to the bank.
“Information rules the web, and getting information in real-time makes online services highly efficient and responsive to customer needs,” Hookdeck said, noting that webhooks offer a simple way for online platforms to share information in real-time.
Alexandre Bouchard and Eric Bang-Tri Tran worked on Hookdeck as a basement project in January 2020 and decided to go full-time that same year, incorporating in January 2021.
“Soon after launching … and having the chance to talk with many tech managers, we realized that the problems we were solving go hand in hand with the difficulty of scaling a queuing infrastructure to handle growing and variable webhook usage,” Hookdeck’s founders said in a statement to BetaKit. “After better understanding the friction to have access to an infrastructure required to manage webhooks at scale, Hookdeck repositioned and leaned in the angle of reliability.”
Hookdeck announced funding today as $3 million CAD; around $320,000 USD, however, comes from a pre-seed funding round closed in September 2021. The seed round closed in January. In October, Hookdeck made its first acquisition, Hookdoo, a scriptable webhook gateway for integration with webhook providers.
“As developers, we’ve wasted countless hours dealing with missed, mission-critical webhooks from Shopify, Stripe and Intercom,” the startup noted. “Each service was different in the configuration options it offered and the steps it took to diagnose. That’s when we realized that, in the age of the connected web, tooling is only one part of the equation. Developer teams needed a complete webhook infrastructure if they were going to efficiently and reliably manage numerous integrations.”
Hookdeck said the funds will enable it to double its team and further strengthen its product as it grows to support users and teams with higher volumes of traffic.
Matrix Partners led the round with participation from a number of individual angel investors, and members of Montréal and New York-based angel investment club Angels of Many. Individual angel investors include Farhan Thawar (VP engineering at Shopify), Alex Plugaru (CTO at Gorgias), Ott Kaukver (CTO at Checkout), and Francois Arbour (CEO at Designstripe). Jean Francois Bouchard, founder of SidLee and C2Montreal, and Majed Masad, founder of Mejuri, where among those that took part through Angels of Many.
The raise comes as Hookdeck claims unprecedented demand for its webhook infrastructure. The startup claims that in the past four months it has doubled the number of new users signing up for its platform, doubled its customer count, and doubled its recurring monthly revenue.
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“The total number of webhooks we’ve processed has increased by 94 percent over average month-over-month, signaling a trend of nearly doubling every month since launch,” Hookdeck claimed.
The startup claims hundreds of teams use Hookdeck to develop, test, and monitor webhooks. Some of the startups using Hookdeck include the Gemini Cryptocurrency Exchange, and Contra, an online community for professionals. Former Olympic rowers and identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (popular for suing Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg) co-founded Gemini in 2014. Gemini is a New York trust company regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and considered by some to be one of the most secure crypto exchanges.
Hookdeck said it is working to find more data points and insights for its customers, which it claimed would make for more effective monitoring and error recovery.
“These updates will allow us to support every type of developer and team starting a project,” the startup said.
With files from Meagan Simpson.
Image courtesy Hookdeck
