Mark Hinkle is no stranger to enterprise technologies and open-source software. Before co-founding TriggerMesh in 2018, he served as Executive Director of the Node.js foundation and previously was VP of marketing at the Linux Foundation and Senior Director at Citrix Systems.
Hinkle co-founded the B2B SaaS startup with Sebastien Goasguen; Hinkle is the CEO while Goasguen is Head of Product. Goasguen is another open-source veteran, who previously was an Open Source Cloud Architect at Citrix, VP of the Apache CloudStack Project at the Apache Software Foundation and Senior Director of Cloud Technologies at Bitnami.
Hinkle and Goasguen worked together on an early cloud computing technology project at Citrix called Apache Cloudstack.
The TriggerMesh integration platform allows developers to build event-driven architecture and cloud-native applications to automate the process of syncing data across cloud services. One of TriggerMesh’s products, Integration as Code, leverages Kubernetes and Knative, which are open-source container-orchestration systems originally developed at Google for deploying, running, and managing server-less, cloud-native applications.
The number of different cloud systems that a given company uses is growing. When there is a change in one system—such as the addition of a new customer—it is treated as an event that triggers the TriggerMesh platform to automatically kick off data flows into the other systems.
“All these things are going on in the cloud, and you need a way to integrate them and tie them together,” Hinkle said. “The problem is that there’s not a good way for these cloud services to talk back and forth. So tying together cloud services so that you could create workflows is what we do. It’s a big thing for building cloud applications.”
Employees of the startup’s 22-person team are spread over four continents, Hinkle said. The Apex-based startup raised almost $5 million this summer from eight investors, according to an SEC filing. The lead investor in the round was Cisco Investments, the VC arm of Cisco, which has one of the largest corporate campuses in RTP.
Through its partnership with Cisco, TriggerMesh will help revamp Cisco’s toolkit by delivering integration services on Cisco’s cloud platform called Intersight, Hinkle said.
TriggerMesh previously raised $3 million from Index Ventures, headquartered in San Francisco and London, and the London-based VC firm Crane Venture Partners, both of which invested again in the most recent round.
TriggerMesh’s ideal target customer is a large, Fortune 10,000 enterprise that wants to create integrations between its cloud or on-premises systems, Hinkle said. Most of their early customers are companies in the financial sector, such as PNC Bank, which uses the software to automate and enforce its IT policies in real-time.
TriggerMesh launched its MVP in October, 2020. A year later, the startup licensed the software under an open-source license—a move which the open-source-expert co-founders always intended to do once their core technology was off the ground, Hinkle said.
In fact, TriggerMesh’s platform differs from other integration platforms such as Dell Boomi and Salesforce’s MuleSoft because it is open-source and event-driven, Hinkle said.
TriggerMesh will use funds raised in the latest round for its go-to market strategies and to expand the TriggerMesh Cloud Native Integration Platform, Hinkle said.