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Elevator Pitch: Import.io – Our Startup of the Week



Meet Matthew Painter from Import.io – our startup of the week

Welcome to the second episode in our the Elevator Pitch series 2.

Every week we’ll publish a 30 second pitch from 12 leading startups from across London. In this series we took the founders to the River Thames, aboard Canary Wharf’s speedboat for the most exciting pitch of their lives.

Copy and paste frustrations

Most people have at one point or another tried to copy data from a webpage.

Copying and pasting tables tend to result in strange layouts, and collating search results involves searching for every individual term – most of the time it becomes easier just to type figures in manually.

An occasional inconvenience for most people, the time it takes to gather data can be make or break for some companies – and that’s where import.io comes in.

Changing the web into a giant database

Import.io gathers – or ‘scrapes’ – data from all over the web.

matthew-painterIts growing collection of different tools and algorithms means it copes with more formats and layouts all the time.

What’s more, users don’t need to write a single line of code – so the process can be much shorter than they would be even for an experienced programmer.

The software offers the full package: a data dashboard, cloud-sharing and exporting features are all included.

And to top it all off, the software is currently absolutely free.

Scraping the barrel

The startup already has a number of success stories.

The British Red Cross wanted to create an app including hospital location data from the NHS. Although the NHS was keen to provide their data there was no interface in place for the app to access the data.

The solution: an import•io Connector interacts directly with the search box on the NHS website, outputting realtime query results directly to the app.

Future Plans

Import.io tell us their mission is to make data on the web accessible to everyone.

They’re sending one of the team out to San Francisco permanently in the next few months to start their growth in the US, and are hoping to expand their team and user base significantly in the next 6 months.

Check back next Tuesday for the next episode of the Elevator Pitch.

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