Baltimore-based Synaptic Era, a Salesforce provider, is leveraging a recent $5 million seed funding round to build a business model on its emerging solution-as-a-service and agent-as-a-service operations, with CEO Bill Karpovich pushing an outcome-based agenda, CRN reported last week.
“Who wants to buy an hour? An hour is an input,” said Karpovich, who took control of the company in 2020 after becoming the first outside investor in the firm. Customers “want to buy an output. (They are) going to buy the outcome – and that’s where it’s evolving,” he said in an interview with the industry publication.
Karpovich, a former IBM and Accenture executive, has been able to attract new investors in his quest to build out AI features for Salesforce customers. Among them are Boulder Ventures’ Jonathan Perl, who backed Karpovich’s previous startup, Zenoss. Other investors in the seed round included Inner Loop Capital and CoFactor Ventures of Baltimore, and San Francisco-based Bloomberg Beta.
Perl told CRN that AI agents were a part of the attraction to Synaptic, besides “Karpovich’s ability to marry past experiences in selling software and selling migration and other services around software.”
New York-based Perl, who joined Boulder Ventures in 2002, has over 25 years of venture capital experience. He sits on the boards of Zenoss, Stardog, Terrago Technologies, PeopleReign, PlayMetrics, Synaptic Advisors, eMinor and Adwerx. One of his portfolio companies, Metron Aviation, was acquired by Airbus and another, Flyby Media, was sold to Apple. Perl has previously been a partner at Intersouth Partners, after being picked as a Kaufmann fellow in 1997. He received an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a BA in Classical History from Tufts University.
Karpovich co-founded Zenoss in 2005, leading it as CEO until 2015 when its AI operation was acquired by Virtana. He also guided, Youreka, a Salesforce-native mobile automation provider, to a sale to Dispatch Technologies in 2022. Karpovich has a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Duke University.
Synaptic is a long-time Salesforce partner, and has delivered over 600 projects. It claims a CSAT customer satisfaction score of 4.98. It fancies bigger opportunities emerging from generative AI. It reportedly offers “prebuilt vertical-specific Concierge chatbots” with guardrails that customers can easily add to their websites. Karpovich reckons the prebuilt AI chatbots and other resources can drive down costs for customers and help create a “longer-term relationship” with them.
In the CRN interview, Karpovich identified healthcare as Synaptic’s No. 1 market, followed by government, the public sector and fintech. Asked about its business model, Karpovich said: “We look a little bit like a SaaS software company. We look a little bit like a consulting company. We look a little bit like managed services. That’s why we came up with the term solution-as-a-service.”
Besides its headquarters in Baltimore, Synaptic has offices in Miami, Fla., San Franciso and Austin, Texas.