COMPANY

Name: Flex.io

Location: Chicago , IL

Founded: 2014

Founder(s): Nate Williams, Ken Kaczmarek

Website: https://www.flex.io

Social Media: Twitter – 8k followers, Facebook – 19, LinkedIn – 39 followers

Industry: Business Analytics

Size: $63.3B in 2018 (Source: Zion Market Research)

Projections: $97.3B by 2025 at a CAGR of 6.4% between 2019 and 2025 (Source: Zion Market Research)

Introduction

Flex.io helps companies that deal with large amounts of data to create and expand data feeds using a few lines of code so that they can focus more on their development efforts on the product side. Flex.io helps companies align their data from various sources, giving the functionality of a spreadsheet lookup function for easier and more effective data collation.

The Product

Flex.io is a cloud-based SaaS company that helps companies turn large API, file, or database tables into a simple spreadsheet lookup function in minutes. The product is an add-on to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, making it easy for users to import data from multiple formats into a spreadsheet, making it easier to collate and build models, charts, and dashboards. Flex.io also helps teams work on the data simultaneously, enabling developers to access richer insights from data and work together to build better products and systems. 

There are three product variants – developers, starter and pro. All variants have Python functionality and GitHub integration, but starter and pro add role-based permissions and consolidated billing for easier use for teams and organizations. Enterprise customers can also get white-label solutions and custom integrations for their data needs.

Origin and Founding Team

After observing the gap between the large data processing needs and the coding efforts that went into making sense of the data, Nate Williams decided to create an automation tool that would enable users to automate processes to help data users receive on-demand, refreshable lookups and extracts using simple, familiar spreadsheet functions through serverless data feeds. Nate is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, and previously founded Gold Prairie LLC, a data analytics and reporting company which owns and operates Flex.io.

His co-founder Ken was the CFO of Gold Prairie before becoming CFO for Flex in 2014. He spent over 4 years working at KPMG in Chicago with a 4-month secondment in Moscow after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996.