Today we’re announcing that Parabola has raised an $8m Series A led by Matrix Partners, bringing our total raised to just over $10m. Ilya Sukhar from Matrix is joining our board, and we’re grateful for participation from Thrive Capital, Elad Gil, AngelPad, Merus Capital, Abstract Ventures, and individual investors.
We’re also announcing our Shopify integration and focus on helping ecommerce companies (including companies that are newly doing business online) navigate unprecedented times. But before we talk about what that means, let’s start with how we got here.
Unequal access to technology
“The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” — William Gibson
I’ve always had a productive and positive relationship with technology. Due in large part to luck and circumstance, I learned how to code when I was young and was able to express my creativity through customizing and creating things in the digital world. But most of my friends, relatives, and peers didn’t have the same experience.
Today, there are two very different kinds of computer users: those who manually operate a computer via much drudgery and those who program computers to do work for them. Most of the benefits have accrued to those who can program a computer.
We were promised that the Digital Revolution would free us from this manual drudgery so we could unleash our innate creativity and curiosity. However, instead of being empowered, for many the forward march of technology has been a loss of agency. But all hope is not lost — we just need to more evenly distribute the future.
Repetitive, manual work
Through a journey that took me out of the world of engineering and into the worlds of both finance and ecommerce, I discovered entire industries built around analytical and creative people stuck doing repetitive, manual work in spreadsheets.
From the marketing analyst compiling yesterday’s attribution metrics to the operations team manually refunding returned orders, manual processes were holding these businesses together.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want new technology. The real problem was that new technology wasn’t being built for the way they work.
Parabola
It turns out I was far from the only person who cared about this problem. I’m privileged to be joined by a phenomenal team of likeminded people who are similarly driven to help more evenly distribute the future.
At Parabola, we come to work every day armed with the belief that everyone has the ability to be amazingly analytical, curious, and creative. Unfortunately (even tragically), most people have never been given the tools and encouragement to unleash their ingenuity.
But what if they were? Every great marketer could try their idea without waiting for engineering resources. Every operations person could solve a problem once and then automate it for the future. Everyone with an interesting insight could build something to test it. In short, the world would have a lot less mundane work and a lot more cool stuff.
We’re building a drag-and-drop productivity tool that lets everyone translate what they want to do into instructions for a computer to do it for them. With a library of customizable, prebuilt steps, you can use Parabola to automate your previously repetitive, manual data tasks with an easy, step-by-step approach. We also have a library of ready-to-use recipes imbued with the subject matter expertise of industry experts to make it even easier to get started and know you’re doing things the right way.
We’re just getting started
With tens of thousands of users across many thousands of companies, we’ve seen people build incredible things with Parabola. We treasure every story we hear of users building flows in Parabola to take over their manual tasks, freeing up time for more strategic/creative work and achieving huge career growth in the process.
With the new money, we’re particularly focused on making Parabola easier to use without compromising on its power. With our new Shopify integration, we’re increasingly delivering on that promise for our ecommerce users who are scrambling to shift offline processes online and rapidly scale their operations to meet demand in a time of COVID. But we believe all knowledge workers can benefit immensely from the version of Parabola we’re building towards.
If you’re excited about this being the last day you do that same manual process in Excel, then welcome to the future. Our support team is ready to help you get set up today at parabola.io.
If you’re excited about helping us deliver this ambitious mission, we’ll need a lot more help so we’d love to hear from you. We’re currently hiring across a variety of roles for people with extreme product passion who are looking for a place they can be rewarded for doing the best work they’ve ever done. Check out our careers page or send me a note at [email protected].
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