How To Make Software Integration Less Painful And Expensive

Forbes

2 days ago

Technology is supposed to set organisations free. Presenting a utopian vision, technology providers promise a world where organisations can constantly add new software to their infrastructure to function more efficiently and effectively; friction should fall while profits rise. The reality, however, is usually very different: each new piece of software may work fantastically well in isolation, but enterprises face the daunting task of integrating it into their existing systems so that it operates in the right way without causing problems.
Jugal Anchalia, the co-founder of Californian start-up Refold AI, experienced that frustration first hand when JustDoc, a previous start-up he had launched, was acquired by the Indian conglomerate Reliance. Anchalia found himself working for massive enterprise that struggled to integrate new technologies. 'We were spending more time managing chaos than building software,' Anchalia recalls.
That experience provided the inspiration for the launch of Refold, which is today announcing a $6.5 million funding round. The company's pitch is that its technology will automatically manage the integration work for organisations adding new software to their existing technology infrastructure. 'Integrations are repeatable and cumbersome; they should not need humans,' says Anchalia.
Refold's solution is a set of artificial intelligence (AI) agents that take on the integration work for companies adding new software. The agent's job is to learn how the software interacts with the company's systems and then to write the code that will properly integrate it. The goal is to ensure that new customer relationship management (CRM) tools, say, work with the business's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems; there are applications across functions including finance, procurement, sales and marketing.
Anchalia concedes that Refold won't replace every element of the integration process. 'No AI is perfect and we're not at a stage where agents can write and maintain 100% of the code,' he says. 'But we can do most of the heavy lifting, replacing much of the manual work of integration, testing the connectivity, and then handing over to a human being to make some final checks and do any fine-tuning that's required.'
The time savings – and therefore the cost savings – are potentially significant. Every integration is different, Anchalia says, but he advises clients to think in terms of reducing an integration time from two to three months to a couple of weeks. The company points to success stories with existing clients such as building automated reconciliation in finance workflows, unifying inventory and order systems for supply chains, and syncing real-time data across ERP and CRM systems.
Since its launch in 2023, Refold has acquired around 30 enterprise customers, citing examples including the data company Incorta and the financial services business Naehas. Its business model is built on selling its solution to software providers rather than the end user; effectively it enables a software provider to present its clients with a solution for rapid integration of its product.
The company has two main sources of competition. One is the growing number of providers offering similar technology-based solutions – research from Gartner highlights competitors such as Zapier, Crosscut and SnapLogic that are growing quickly in this market. The other is the consultancy sector, where all the big groups offer software integration services as part of their business transformation and digitisation propositions.
Still, with enterprises worldwide now spending as much as $350 billion a year on software integration, there's plenty of market to go at. Refold's investors think it is capable of building a sizeable business, particularly with capital that will enable further product development and more investment in go-to-market activity.
Today's $6.5 million round includes $1.2 million of pre-seed finance and $5.3 million of seed funding. It is led by Eniac Ventures and Tidal Ventures with participation from Better Capital, Ahead VC, Karman Ventures, Z21 and a number of business angels.
'For decades, companies have burned billions on brittle, bloated workflows,' says Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner at Eniac Ventures. 'As we enter the agentic era, enterprise integrations stand out as one of the most compelling and valuable use cases.'
'For decades, we've been patching integrations with expensive consultants and manual work,' adds Nick Muy, venture partner at Tidal Ventures. 'Refold's AI agents don't just patch the problem; they eliminate it – this is a fundamental leap forward.'