Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

SailPoint, an identity management company that went public in 2017, announced it was going to be acquiring Intello, an early-stage SaaS management startup. The two companies did not share the purchase price.

SailPoint believes that by helping its customers locate all of the SaaS tools being used inside a company, it can help IT make the company safer. Part of the problem is that it’s so easy for employees to deploy SaaS tools without IT’s knowledge, and Intello gives them more visibility and control.

In fact, the term “shadow IT” developed over the last decade to describe this ability to deploy software outside of the purview of IT pros. With a tool like Intello, they can now find all of the SaaS tools and point the employees to sanctioned ones, while shutting down services the security pros might not want folks using.

Grady Summers, EVP of product at SailPoint, says that this problem has become even more pronounced during the pandemic as many companies have gone remote, making it even more challenging for IT to understand what SaaS tools employees might be using.

“This has led to a sharp rise in ungoverned SaaS sprawl and unprotected data that is being stored and shared within these apps. With little to no visibility into what shadow access exists within their organization, IT teams are further challenged to protect from the cyber risks that have increased over the past year,” Summers explained in a statement. He believes that with Intello in the fold, it will help root out that unsanctioned usage and make companies safer, while also helping them understand their SaaS spend better.

Intello has always seen itself as a way to increase security and compliance and has partnered in the past with other identity management tools like Okta and OneLogin. The company was founded in 2017 and raised $5.8 million according to Crunchbase data. That included a $2.5 million extended seed in May 2019.

Yesterday, another SaaS management tool, Torii, announced a $10 million Series A. Other players in the SaaS management space include BetterCloud and Blissfully, among others.

Today, that software is offered as a cloud service should be pretty much considered a given. Certainly any modern tooling is going to be SaaS, and as companies and employees add services, it becomes a management nightmare. Enter Torii, an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier to manage SaaS bloat.

Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A investment led by Wing Venture Capital, with participation from prior investors Entree Capital, Global Founders Capital, Scopus Ventures and Uncork Capital. The investment brings the total raised to $15 million, according to the company. Under the terms of the deal, Wing partner Jake Flomenberg is joining the board.

Uri Haramati, co-founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who helped launch Houseparty and Meerkat. As a serial founder, he says that he and his co-founders saw firsthand how difficult it was to manage their companies’ SaaS applications, and the idea for Torii developed from that.

“We all felt the changes around SaaS and managing the tools that we were using. We were all early adopters of SaaS. We all [took advantage of SaaS] to scale our companies and we felt the same thing: The fact is that you just can’t add more people who manage more software, it just doesn’t scale,” Haramati told me.

He said they started Torii with the idea of using software to control the SaaS sprawl they were experiencing. At the heart of the idea was an automation engine to discover and manage all of the SaaS tools inside an organization. Once you know what you have, there is a no-code workflow engine to create workflows around those tools for key activities like onboarding or offboarding employees.

Torii Workflow Engine. Image Credits: Torii

The approach seems to be working. As the pandemic struck in 2020, more companies than ever needed to control and understand the SaaS tooling they had, and revenue grew 400% YoY last year. Customers include Delivery Hero, Chewy, Monday.com and Palo Alto Networks.

The company also doubled its employees from a dozen with which they started last year, with plans to get to 60 people by the end of this year. As they do that, as experienced entrepreneurs, Haramati told me they already understood the value of developing a diverse and inclusive workforce, certainly around gender. Today, the team is 25 people with 10 being women and they are working to improve those ratios as they continue to add new people.

Flomenberg invested in Torii because he was particularly impressed with the automation aspect of the company and how it took a holistic approach to the SaaS management problem, rather than attempting to solve one part of it. “When I met Uri, he described this vision. It was really to become the operating system for SaaS. It all starts with the right data. You can trust data that is gathered from [multiple] sources to really build the right picture and pull it together. And then they took all those signals and they built a platform that is built on automation,” he said.

Haramati admits that it’s challenging to scale in the midst of a pandemic, but the company is growing and is already working to expand the platform to include product recommendations and help with compliance and cost control.

BetterCloud gives IT visibility into its SaaS tools providing the means to discover, manage and secure those tools. In the middle of a crisis that has forced most companies to move workers home, being able to manage SaaS usage in this way is growing increasingly significant.

Today the company announced a $75 million Series F. Warburg Pincus led the way with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, Greycroft Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, New Amsterdam Growth Capital and e.ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to $187 million, according to the company.

While CEO David Politis acknowledges the gravity of the current situation, he also recognizes that giving companies a way to manage their SaaS usage is more pertinent than ever. “What has happened in the last two months has been terrible for the world, but in some crazy way it has just made what we do a lot more relevant,” Politis told TechCrunch .

He says the pandemic has really accelerated the market opportunity because of the reliance on cloud services and the services his company provides.

Those services began as an operational layer on top of G Suite. Later it added support for Office 365 and in 2016 it moved to more general SaaS management. It now offers direct integrations into multiple SaaS apps including Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zendesk and more. The set of tools in Bettercloud gives IT control over security, configuration, spend optimization and auditability across SaaS applications.

In normal times after a large Series F round, we might be talking about this being the last round before an IPO, but Politis isn’t ready to commit to that just yet, especially in this economy. He does say, however, that he’s in it for the long haul and sees an opportunity to build a long-term, sustainable company.

“The last couple of months I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and when you take a $75 million round at the stage you’re not doing that because you want to sell the business. You’re doing that because you want to build something and build something really special,” he said.