Brilliant Enterprise Magic — welcome Bem!
Y Combinator famously encourages their companies to “build something people want”. As a regular investor in developer tools & infrastructure companies, my version of this is “build something companies need … that they’re currently spending tons of resources on themselves and isn’t core IP” (or something similar but catchier).
I love backing founders who are solving problems they’ve faced first-hand in previous jobs. Their appreciation of the pain of the status quo and ability to connect with buyers is often an incredible advantage in the early days of building out a sales motion.
I also love companies building technology to help every company (be it a two-person tech startup or a century-old manufacturing company) act like the best companies in the world, through building great software; selling or marketing their products, managing their teams or anything else that name-brand Silicon Valley companies have been excelling at for the last few decades.
Sometimes I get all three in one company (with bonus points for tenacious immigrant/children of immigrant founders) and the idea just makes sense. Enter Bem.
Today, software engineers in so many companies spend huge chunks of time ensuring their systems can communicate with each other or external suppliers/partners/customers, especially when dealing with messy data inputs like invoices, emails, natural-language conversations, and strangely formatted spreadsheets.
Bem’s AI-powered data interface transforms any input — structured or unstructured — into ready-to-use data, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual processes. Essentially, Bem provides structured data as-a-service (let’s call it “SDaaS”), so software engineers do not have to spend time homogenizing disparate data. From legacy systems to modern applications, Bem seamlessly ingests and transforms data, allowing engineering teams to focus on what truly matters.
Why is SDaaS important? Like me, Bem wants teams to focus on building what matters most to their users, instead of being bogged down by building yet another integration or parser dealing with unreliable, untrustworthy data. It’s hard enough to build products people want so imagine doing it while playing whack-a-mole with shaping messy data.
Bem is working with software teams that are building for critical sectors, including complex supply chains, logistics, healthcare, insurance, and financial services. These customers are doing cool stuff using SDaaS like:
- Unblocking revenue and expanding TAM through integrations with difficult systems (even those without “modern” APIs)
- Onboarding customers faster by allowing them to drag and drop data dumps from other systems (Bem deals with transforming those inputs into your own data schema)
- Integrating conversational data (like email threads and text) and transforming them seamlessly into your application data
- Transforming PDFs with invoice or order data into your internal application system
- Structuring and homogenizing messy data before sending it to your ETL, datalake, or unified database
Bem’s co-founders, Antonio (CEO) and Upal (CTO), lived the pain of messy data first-hand at their last startup, Silo — the operating system for the food supply chain. We’re excited for them to use everything they learned there to help every other software team instantly become excellent at stuff that most companies are terrible at and no software engineer really wants to spend time on.
I’m excited to announce that Uncork Capital has led Bem’s $3.7M seed financing, alongside our friends Kevin Mahaffey, Roar Ventures, Garry Tan, and founders and executives of top logistics and supply-chain companies. We’re also excited that Ken Yeung of VentureBeat broke the news. His article provides a lot of great context about the company and its technology.
Welcome Antonio, Upal, and all the Bem-sters to the Uncork portfolio. And cheers to building the interoperability holy grail: systems communicating with each other in their native language, true plug-and-play!
