We spent more than a decade building many of the largest e-commerce sites in the US and around the world, and in nearly every implementation we would spend months collecting and cleaning up product data so that it could support strong search & navigation.

Even the Fortune 500 companies we worked with had (simply put) crappy data. Why, we wondered, could nobody get this right?

Retailers & distributors were getting their data largely from suppliers that could not meet their demands, but – peeling back the onion – it was clear that the game was rigged against suppliers.

Walmart wants an HTML description that’s no more than 4000 characters, but Amazon wants a 2000 character description without HTML. Walgreens wants 950×950 gifs but Ebay needs a bigger zoom image. Multiply these requirements by thousands of products and hundreds of retailers and it’s simply impossible for a brand to get it 100% right.

Not to mention that copying & pasting data between spreadsheets is not a fun way to spend your day.

We started Salsify to make creating, managing, and exchanging great product information – especially rich marketing copy and extended attributes – easy, efficient, and even fun.

Our goal is to build a global network through which product information flows between companies instantly, seamlessly, and without hassle.

At heart we’re technologists that built our careers in e-commerce and love retail, both brick and click. We’re building a product that’s technologically very powerful and usable by marketers, buyers, merchants, and salespeople without PhDs in computer science.

We’ve come a long way since starting in a Boston basement in late 2012, and now have great, happy customers across the entire supply chain, from brands to distributors to retailers to marketplaces.

Our investors – which include two of the USA’s top investors in cloud technology, David Skok of Matrix Partners and Ric Fulop of North Bridge Venture Partners – are just as excited about our vision as we are.

There is still a lot of road to run to build Salsify’s global network, but we’ve already come a long way.