Integration infrastructure matters more than APIs
Zachary Kirby, co-founder of Vessel, on building the Vercel for integrations
The durable value in integration infra sits in the plumbing behind the API surface, not in the common schema itself. Vessel learned that GTM APIs like Salesforce and HubSpot are usually open enough that mapping contacts, accounts, and deals is straightforward, while the harder work is keeping data fresh, handling auth, rate limits, polling, webhooks, and ETL at scale. That made the business naturally broader than CRM and GTM alone.
-
Vessel moved from a CRM wrapper toward a horizontal product integration platform because its core asset was a reusable extraction and sync pipeline. Once that infrastructure existed, adding new integrations mainly meant wiring auth and endpoints, which let it expand from about 20 to nearly 100 integrations quickly.
-
This is very different from companies like Plaid, Finch, and Pinwheel, where the hard part is often getting access to closed systems through scraping, file feeds, or partnerships. In those markets, the API wrapper and the relationship layer are tightly linked because access itself is scarce.
-
The same pattern shows up in the next wave of native integration companies. Ampersand argues unified APIs work for the first 10 fields, but enterprise customers eventually need custom objects, tenant specific configs, rate limit handling, and field level logs. That is where shallow unification stops being enough.
Going forward, the market is likely to split more clearly in two. One group will win by unlocking hard to reach systems and building partner networks. The other will win by becoming the default infrastructure for customer facing product integrations across many open SaaS categories. As more connectors get generated by AI, operational depth and maintenance automation should matter even more.