Sara Du
Sara Du is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alloy Automation (YC W20). Prior to Alloy, Sara was an engineer at Snap and DoNotPay. She completed 25% of her undergrad at Harvard, during which she was involved with Dorm Room Fund, before leaving to start her company.
Gregg Mojica
Gregg Mojica is the CTO and Co-Founder of Alloy Automation (YC W20). Previously, he served as Application Architect at Fiserv in Mountain View, CA where he worked to modernize the company’s legacy infrastructure and helped co-create the First Data Developer Portal.
What inspired your team to create this company?
My cofounder Gregg and I have been working together for 5 years now. We met through the open source developers community, and started working together on side projects.
Before we started Alloy though, we were living pretty different lives. I’d left high school early to move to SF and work at a startup called DoNotPay, after which I decided to give school another shot and do my undergrad at Harvard. I left Harvard because I didn’t feel like I was learning the way I liked, and ended up at Snap as an engineer. Meanwhile, Gregg was working on an agency full time after leaving college as well.
We started Alloy as just a side project. We got the idea from the work we were doing for friends – a lot of them had become influencers in the past 2 years and we often helped them write custom code to do things like automatically upload IG pictures to their Shopify stores. We realized we should just build a platform to make it easier for any nontechnical store owner to automate store operations, and so we began building Alloy, just the 2 of us, almost exactly a year ago.
What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We’re making workflow automation more accessible to an extremely nontechnical, ecommerce audience by making it easy to connect various apps and APIs using a drag and drop interface. We’re also building up a marketplace of workflow templates that users can use immediately to implement business strategies like SMS for abandoned cart recovery (similar to how Airtable has the template marketplace that targets various types of users).
By focusing on the e-commerce vertical, we’re able to provide functionality that isn’t supported in other general automation platforms like Zapier. For example, we provide users the ability to loop through and perform actions on all of the line items within an order, or access other deeply nested data like tax codes to export to other apps.