My co-founder Jason Newman and I are passionate about helping small and midsize businesses (SMBs) because we both grew up working in our own families’ small businesses. My dad built a book bindery shop from scratch, and Jason’s dad owned a toolbelt company.
As children of the 1990s, Jason and I were part of that weird middle generation bordering millennials on one side and Gen X on the other. We saw the world before computers and cell phones were prolific, and then embraced all that emerging technology through middle school and high school, including when, as pimple-faced teenagers, we built an online store together for the Newman toolbelt company (using OS Commerce!).
It was our first taste of how technology could help a small business, and it’s become our lifelong obsession to help more small businesses. At Kolla, we’ve made it our mission to give all businesses access to the best software to optimally run their operations. We do that by making it possible for their software to integrate simply and securely.
While large businesses have teams wiring up their software to talk to each other, SMBs are often left in the dust with dozens of point solutions that don’t talk, leaving employees to input data manually between systems or without the ability to even use great software because of a lack of compatibility.
Jason and I know firsthand how important software integration is because we did a ton of it during our time at Weave, where we built communication software for local businesses that integrated with their customer databases. Jason was Weave’s chief architect and I was the chief technology officer, and together we wrote over 90 custom integrations with CRMs and other customer database software for small businesses with disparate systems. Most of those CRMs were on-premise with no APIs and no developer portals or documentation. We saw—very up close and personal—how difficult it was to get our software to talk with our customers’ software. The process was tedious and required hours and hours of maintenance and upkeep.
In other words, integration was a total nightmare, yet it had a huge positive impact on small companies’ efficiency and processes.
As Weave was preparing to go public, Jason and I decided to head out on our own, and we started discussing what we wanted to build next. Having been in the trenches of integrations for the better part of a decade, we knew that was a problem we wanted to tackle.
Kolla is the integration platform we always wished we had. It’s made of the lessons we learned and the efficiencies we dreamed of to make life easier for you: the CTOs and engineering teams of the world. All of Kolla’s products aid in accelerating and improving the integration experience specifically for you, the developer, because we’re developers too—and we feel your pain!
We don’t build no-code solutions or drag-and-drop visual editors. Instead, we focus on tools to make custom integration code more secure and easier for developers to write and maintain.
The Greek word κολλα, or kolla, means “glue.” We chose this as the name for our company because Kolla will hold firmly together your entire integration ecosystem. If you’re ready to level up while simplifying your workload with the best integration platform on the market, schedule a free demo today.
