“We cut the amount of time we spend wrangling with files by 95%. We basically had all hands working to solve those problems at times. The reduction in effort has saved us tens of thousands of dollars. Flatfile is a really good value for us.”
We’re proud Flatfile is back as a 3x SaaStr Annual sponsor!
The Integration Problem That Haunts Every B2B Company
Here’s a scenario every B2B founder knows intimately: You’ve just closed a big enterprise deal. The champagne is still chilling. Then your customer success team sends the dreaded Slack message: “The new client uploaded their CSV file and… it’s a disaster. None of the columns match. Half the dates are European format, half are US. There are special characters everywhere. This is going to take weeks to fix.”
Sound familiar? Unless your software is for brand new businesses (a website builder for first-time e-commerce store owners, for example), then you have to onboard the customer’s data before you can truly onboard the customer.
The brutal reality is that making your customers struggle with how to onboard their data into your platform – before they even get to see the kind of magic your app does – is a poor user experience. Especially when that spreadsheet import inevitably fails for reasons like special characters, large file sizes, incorrect formats, or connection timeouts.
Enter Flatfile: The Data Onboarding Platform That Actually Works
Founded in 2018 by David Boskovic and Eric Crane, Flatfile is the AI data preparation and migration software that helps teams extract, prepare, map, transform, and validate messy data. But here’s what makes them special: they’ve turned the traditionally painful process of data import into something that actually delights customers.
The Denver-based company has raised $94.6 million total, including a $35M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners and a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global. That’s serious validation for what many might dismiss as “just a CSV importer.”
The Numbers That Matter
Let’s talk scale. Flatfile hit $10.9M in revenue in 2024, up from $6.7M in 2023. That’s 63% year-over-year growth with 500 customers and 65 employees.
But here’s the kicker: From a revenue perspective, the company went from zero to $1 million in ARR in its first year, then close to $4 million in its second year. That’s the kind of hockey stick growth that makes VCs write big checks.
Their customer roster reads like a who’s who of SaaS: Square, BambooHR and HubSpot. These aren’t small companies experimenting with a nice-to-have tool. These are enterprise SaaS giants who’ve made Flatfile mission-critical to their customer onboarding process.
Why This Actually Matters (Beyond the Pretty Numbers)
The data onboarding problem isn’t just an engineering headache—it’s a business killer. Building your own data importer can be a challenge for many reasons. It not only requires a lot of engineering work to do it right, but also means engineers need to dedicate precious development time to maintaining the importer.
Even worse? FAQs, documentation, and lengthy instructional videos often need to be created to help users understand how to import their data. That’s engineering resources, support resources, and documentation resources all getting sucked into what should be a solved problem.
Flatfile eliminates all of that. With unique data validation features like Data Hooks®, Flatfile guides you through any necessary changes to ensure imported data is clean, accurate, and ready to use. Their AI mapping engine aligns incoming data to your schema—field by field, no matter how inconsistent the source file is. It doesn’t just look at column names; it understands what the data means, draws from billions of prior decisions, and gets smarter with every import.
The Platform Play That Changes Everything
Here’s where Flatfile gets really interesting. They’ve evolved beyond just being an embeddable CSV importer. The Flatfile platform is designed to plug into both product and process. While we retain the concept of integrating Flatfile directly by embedding it, you can also leverage data templates, validation rules, and programmatic Data Hooks® across non-embedded flows.
Their latest platform includes:
- Flatfile Workspaces: A Flatfile workspace offers a shared view of all data imports with relevant details like versions, status, owners, and validation errors.
- Portal 3.0: You can deploy Portal 3.0 using our streamlined SDK, and simply choose the type of data you want to collect. Data owners are then guided through an AI-powered data onboarding experience.
- Real-time collaboration: Team members can comment directly on data cells to add context, ask questions, or flag issues.
The AI Advantage
This isn’t just another data tool slapping “AI” on their marketing copy. Flatfile’s AI capabilities are genuinely transformative:
AI Transform lets you adapt data at scale using simple prompts. Describe what you want changed, and Flatfile instantly applies those edits across your dataset. Their configuration agent handles the work you’d normally hand off to a developer—from creating constraints and writing custom actions to installing plugins and updating your schema.
The result? By using AI, users can perform more and more complex data review, validation and transformation actions than ever before, and even less tech-savvy users can manipulate data.
Pricing That Starts at Free
Flatfile’s customer fees range from free for companies with five to 10 employees who are just getting started, to a few thousand dollars, then all the way up to $500,000. That’s a pricing model that scales with value delivered—exactly what you want to see in B2B SaaS.
Buy vs Build
Flatfile provides a production-ready platform, leagues ahead of solutions commonly built in-house. While you could probably dedicate a small team of engineers to work on a custom data importer, such a project would be quite expensive, time-consuming to maintain, and in the end it still wouldn’t be as good as what Flatfile has to offer out of the box.
Their abstraction layer makes data retrieval and processing over 10x faster than before, and new authentication methods paired with isolated runtime environments ensure data is safe.
The Bottom Line
In a world where every B2B company eventually faces the data import problem, Flatfile has built a leading solution. They’ve taken a historically painful, resource-intensive process and turned it into a competitive advantage for their customers.
For B2B founders still wrestling with building data importers in-house, the math is simple: Flatfile cuts the amount of time spend wrangling with files by 95%.
