Tactile Launches With Focus On Synchronization Technology And $11.2M In Series A Funding

Funded by $11.2M in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, Tactile recently launched with the intent of delivering applications that allow professionals to obtain integrated access to data from disparate data sources. The company’s first application, Tact, enables salespeople to synchronize and integrate data about contacts from multiple sources such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Outlook. Tactile’s patent pending “personal sync platform” enables users to combine data from disparate data sources in order to obtain an enriched, holistic, 360 degree view of data that would otherwise remain fragmented and siloed. As such, Tactile builds upon the possibilities for integration and synchronization enabled by cloud-based platforms such as iCloud and Evernote that can synchronize data dispersed across multiple devices.

Tactile CEO Chuck Ganapathi remarked on the contemporary importance of synchronization technologies as follows:

In our personal lives, we have come to expect everything — photos, music, documents — to be available everywhere and instantly up to date. Sync is the defining technology of this generation, and we are on a mission to bring its power to our work lives and deliver business applications that people love.

Here, Ganapathi echoes a remark by Steve Jobs about the importance of synchronization made in one of the last public talks before his death:

I pick up my iPad and it doesn’t have that song on it. So I have to sync my iPhone to my Mac. Then I have to sync my other devices to the Mac to get that song but then they’ve deposited some photos on the Mac so I have to sync the iPhone again with the Mac to get those photos and keeping those devices in sync is driving us crazy.

Whereas iCloud focuses on device synchronization for a specific set of iOS-based devices, Tactile specializes in data synchronization that leverages multiple applications. Given the increasing plurality of software applications whose functionality overlaps to the point where synchronization would be useful, if not imperative, Tactile stands poised to carve out a niche for itself based on the value proposition of putting the needs of the end-user first, and figuring out how to best serve those needs. With an impressive round of Series A funding in the bank, expect to hear more detailed announcements about Tactile’s approach to synchronization and the purview of its vision in the months ahead.