The Digital Executive
Daniel Chilcott: Inside Flowgear’s AI Integration Platform | Ep 1248
12 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Corozant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corozant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Daniel Chilcott.
Daniel Chilcott serves as CEO and co-founder of Flowgear, a globally recognized integration platform as a service, or IPaaS, trusted by businesses of all sizes to streamline data and app-to-app interactions without the complexity of traditional tools.
As a tech entrepreneur working to solve app integration, he has focused his 15 plus years within the company pursuing the mission of reducing complexity without compromising capability. He leads the team in their ultimate goal of freeing up organizations to focus on their business process rather than technical implementation details.
Chapter 2: What inspired Daniel Chilcott to co-found Flowgear?
Well, good afternoon, Daniel. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me, Brian. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it, especially today. I don't always go this far internationally in the podcast, but you're hailing out of Cape Town, South Africa. I'm in Kansas City. So jumping through time zones and calendars. I am so appreciative of you, my friend. So thank you.
And Daniel, let's jump into your first question. You co-founded Flowgear back in 2010 and have spent more than 15 years focused on solving integration challenges. What inspired you to start the company? What core problem you were most determined to solve?
Yeah, well, the origin story is actually fairly mundane. My first real job was working in a business that had a software company spun up within it. And I became the first software engineer. And basically, it was just a fight to survive. So anything that came through the door, we would build. So it was custom project, custom project.
Chapter 3: How does Flowgear simplify app integration for businesses?
And over time, we realized that we wanted to make some of it reusable. And a lot of the requests that we were getting for customers were around CRM. This is in the late sort of 2000s. And so we realized that we could create something that was much more reusable.
And then everything else that was requested, you know, auto processing or some kind of finance backend, those were shipped as modules on this kind of platform. ever more expensive CRM that we built. And that was great. And we got reusability out of that. But every customer coming to us wanted a way to integrate what we had shipped for them into the other systems that they were already using.
And so that's kind of where the itch came from around figuring out how do we make integration reusable as well. And the difficult thing with it is that You can sort of build a CRM once, so to speak, and it has to have a certain level of configurability. But after that, you can sort of sell it as is. But integration is actually seldom like that. Where there is value, there's customization needed.
So the question becomes, how much can you pre-build as a platform versus what needs to be implemented specifically for a customer? So long story short, I left that business to start the company that preceded Flowgear. And we had a desktop app that was very lightweight by today's standard integration platform.
Sold that for a few years, worked on it over two, three years, posted a bunch of customers on it. And then one of our customers approached me to do a deal in 2010. And the idea then was to take that concept and deliver that as a cloud service in its own right. And today that sounds obvious, but back then it was actually quite unusual to have an integration platform as a cloud service.
And a lot of our early customers didn't understand why we would want to do that. A lot of the end points that they were integrating into back then were actually on premise and needless to say, that's flipped. So that's where we came from, this idea of creating a reusable way to integrate.
It's amazing. And I just love that. as you said, your first real job in a company that spun up like a software company. And that's where you cut your teeth in software development. I think that's pretty cool. That's where I started cutting my teeth in application development. Very cool. I liked how you talked about, you know, meeting customers needs through this integration.
And you said wherever there's some value, there's a need for some customization, some integration there. And I do want to highlight that you were in the cloud space early on. And I know that's obvious, as you said, but back then it was really bleeding edge. So thank you for sharing.
And Daniel, with your recent launch of new runtime powered by AI Copilot, how is AI transforming the way businesses approach integration and automation?
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