Five Questions With: Pat Sabatino

Pat Sabatino is CEO and founder of Providence firm Datarista. / COURTESY PAT SABATINO
Pat Sabatino is CEO and founder of Providence firm Datarista. / COURTESY PAT SABATINO

Pat Sabatino, CEO and founder of Providence firm Datarista, talks with Providence Business News about the new company and how it received $350,000 in funding from the Slater Technology Fund. The funding was part of a $1 million seed round led by Slater and other private investors. Datarista’s delivery platform simplifies the process of integrating third-party data into various cloud-based customer relationship management and marketing automation platforms used by organizations.

PBN: How long has Datarista been in business? What made you want to start your own company?

SABATINO: Datarista was incorporated on July 1, 2015, but I started churning the idea back in May of 2009. At the time I was the general manager of list and data operations for Jigsaw, a company that pioneered the concept of Data-as-a-Service. While there I had some concepts on how to use our technology to integrate data sets other than our own using our technology. The company was sold to Salesforce in 2010 where I played with some similar product concepts but I realized that the need was far larger than just the Salesforce platform. While I have been an early employee at many startups, I never had the itch to be an entrepreneur. However this idea was too big and too good so I took the plunge. Today we have four employees and two contract workers. We will be growing to eight over the next 60 days and then on to 12 and beyond this fall.

PBN: Can you talk about what kind of service it provides?

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SABATINO: The $11 billion sales & marketing data industry is a legacy industry. Their delivery has always involved licensing data and shipping it to a physical location to be used or loaded into on premise software. More and more the delivery point for data is shifting to SaaS-based CRM and marketing automation platforms. The end users of these platforms expect products to be integrated with cloud platforms, but the data industry is late to the game because they are not software companies. We are providing an integration platform for the entire industry.

PBN: Can you explain how the platform works, and what kind of third-party data would be integrated? What sort of companies do you work with?

SABATINO: For data providers on our platform we provide Data-as-a-Service integrations to the most popular CRM and marketing automation platforms. This removes the need for their customers to do offline data integration to enhance customer data and will speed up data velocity by enabling sale leads and marketing prospects to be available on demand from within the business process. Our customers are the hundreds of companies that provide sales & marketing data around the globe, ranging from large public companies to smaller vertical knowledge providers. They will sell our integrations white-labeled as their own to the tens of thousands of companies that use their data.

PBN: How will the company use the funding from Slater?

SABATINO: We are extremely happy to be partnered with Slater. The funding from their round will help us move into our first office, located in Providence, and to continue to hire developers and support staff. After years of commuting from Narragansett to Silicon Valley I really wanted to build an enterprise software company here. I want us to be a great “Made in Rhode Island” story and Slater’s support has been the largest enabler in our pursuit of that goal.

PBN: Where do you see the business in five years?

SABATINO: Still here in Rhode Island for sure! We have a very robust product roadmap that we will keep to ourselves for now … we may surprise some people as a sizeable employer by then.

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