March 30, 2021

Michael Zuercher officially launches his second software platform today, and if early signs are correct, he might be on his way to a second startup success story.

Zuercher’s first foray into entrepreneurship led to a national leader in the public safety software vertical – now CentralSquare Technologies.

It also set the stage for Prismatic, his newest venture, which is designed to solve a technology problem that plagued him in his first company.

“It is a problem that was a huge strategic thing we dealt with all the time at Zuercher, and it’s cathartic to spend all your waking hours working on the problem that plagued you for so long,” he said.

The problem involves integration – and Prismatic’s platform is designed to make it easier for software companies to build integrations and provide a more seamless integration experience to their customers.

“This is going to sound really niche-y, but we’re very focused on business-to-business software companies and specifically B2B software companies that, for strategic reasons, see value in delivering … out-of-the-box integrations to their customers,” Zuercher said.

He began working on the platform with a small team of former colleagues from his previous company in late 2019.

“From a personal perspective, there’s a bit more whiplash than I gave it credit for going from a midsize back to three people in one room,” Zuercher said.

Even that didn’t last long. The team went remote a few months after starting to work together because of the pandemic.

“So we had three or four months under our belt before everybody went remote, and that was super fortuitous,” he said. “We got to set a vision, get some of the beginning in place … and we were in execution mode, and it turned out very well from that perspective for us.”

The goal was in part to empower nondevelopers in a company to take on more of the integration workload than ever before.

“For a platform like this to succeed in the real world of a B2B software company, it has to be something developers actually want to use and that they can tailor to work the way it needs to for their product and their organization,” said Justin Hipple, Prismatic co-founder and chief technology officer. “We’ve built Prismatic from day one to be developer-friendly and extensible at every turn.”

While Prismatic launches the general availability of its embedded integration platform today, it’s already in use and generating revenue.

“We have paying customers that have it in production, so it’s not like flipping a giant switch,” Zuercher said. “We’ve seen enough success with people on the platform and success in the market that we can put a milepost and say: ‘This is the embodiment of the beginning of the solution, the vision we set out for.’ And that’s the point we’re at.”

One early customer is Sioux Falls-based Raven Industries, which is working with Prismatic in its applied technology division involving precision agriculture solutions.

“With Prismatic, we’re able to deliver integrations in far less time while streamlining our engineering effort,” said Raven engineering manager Chris Rallis. “Prismatic has given us the ability to more widely build integrations across our teams. It has also allowed our customer-facing teams to handle customer-specific deployment. These are two key examples of how Prismatic makes our developers more productive and moving forward on the innovations we have happening all over at Raven.”

Raven is a “classic example of a company in a niche vertical market, in their case ag, with a whole bunch of solutions, that wants to empower their customers as much as possible,” Zuercher said. “So Prismatic gives them a way to do that very efficiently as a software company.”

Prismatic has grown to nine employees and is hiring more engineering staff.

The platform is immediately available to any B2B software company and is designed for those “looking to reduce the integration burden on engineering teams, offload integration infrastructure concerns, onboard customers faster, provide better integration support, minimize problems in production, respond to market needs faster and better productize their integrations,” the company said.

Prismatic offers multiple plans, including a free tier. Visit prismatic.io for information or to sign up.

“We started with the belief that this was a gap in the market, and I think what we’ve seen in the last year and a half is not just have we built an offering I think is a very good solution and we’ve seen traction, but we’ve seen the market evolve to a general understanding that platforms like Prismatic need to exist,” Zuercher said.

“So we are very, very well-positioned to take advantage of the macro effect of software companies continuing to take integration as a more and more important part of their strategy and at the same time with the expectation they should be able to use things like Prismatic to simplify the creation and delivery of those.”