Short · 2026-09-29
The London backend startup that Apple folded into Claris.
A backend service that pitched itself as "IFTTT meets Heroku," reportedly bought by Apple in March 2019 and announced that August as the basis of Claris Connect.
Stamplay's card on Stompstart's London page, captured in September 2019, fitted its pitch into three words: "IFTTT meets Heroku." Its description opened with an argument. "Uber isn't just Uber. It's Google Maps, Braintree payments, Twilio texts and much more." The best way to do business, it went on, was not to build everything in-house; top companies were "piecing together a composite of specialized APIs." Stompstart filed it under back end as a service and developer tools.
The same words ran in April 2015, when StartUp Beat featured "London-based Stamplay," founded by Giuliano Iacobelli and Nicola Mattina. It described the product as a faster way "to put together a fully functional back-end mixing APIs and other building blocks," named Seedcamp and Club Italia Investimenti as investors, and priced it as freemium with three paid tiers from $29 to $199.
On 21 March 2019 9to5Mac, citing the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, reported that Apple had bought Stamplay for about 5 million euros. It called Stamplay an Italian startup whose web-based editor let developers build a backend from services such as Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio and Pusher. Apple had not commented.
The purchase was formally announced that summer. On 6 August 2019 Apple's FileMaker subsidiary renamed itself Claris International and announced that it had acquired Stamplay, SiliconANGLE reported. Stamplay's technology would underpin a new product, Claris Connect, for linking data across cloud services. Iacobelli, Stamplay's former chief executive, would lead the Connect team, and the product would open by invitation that autumn.
Claris Connect is still sold as a workflow automation service, with prebuilt connectors for apps such as Slack, HubSpot and Stripe and custom connectors for almost any app with a REST API. The page does not mention Stamplay, and stamplay.com did not respond when checked.