A group of investors, including CDPQ’s Equity 253 fund, Investissement Québec, Rainfall Ventures, Tom Williams, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Mistral Ventures, have contributed $20 million to help the startup Unito bring together several SaaS platforms like Jira and Trello.
With this latest infusion of capital, Unito has received a total of $33 million, which Marc Boscher, CEO at Unito, says will be used to fund new product development and increase staffing levels from 65 to 70 by year’s end.
According to a 2019 report by Blissfully, businesses are spending an average of $343,000 annually on software as a service. This is despite the fact that only 40 to 60 tools are actually being used by corporate teams.
On the other hand, while SaaS programs are vital to modern businesses, they can be cumbersome to manage. LeanIX, an enterprise architecture firm, surveyed businesses in 2021 and discovered that few of them had established uniform rules for who was responsible for managing their SaaS platforms.
Boscher and Eryk Warren enrolled in Montreal’s Founder Institute program in 2015 on a quest to find a solution or create one.
Boscher is a veteran of the IT sector, while Warren has a background in software engineering thanks to his time spent at Montreal companies like Outbox Technology (makers of an events ticketing platform) and Fluential.
When Boscher and Warren figured out how to help businesses deal with SaaS sprawl, they decided to start their own business and called it Unito, which they formally launched in the fall of 2015. The two founders decided to integrate and automatically sync preexisting SaaS products rather than develop a new collaboration platform.
Boscher told USA Times in an email interview that “the huge growth of internet tools is producing nearly as many issues as it solves.”
As virtual information silos,” tools designed for cooperation can actually inhibit collaboration.” There is a proliferation of SaaS tools because of the rise of remote work, leading to fragmentation because employees can use them from any location and device.
Unito makes an effort to reduce this disarray by integrating a wide variety of tools (including ClickUp, GitLab, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Wrike) into a single platform. Users can plot other users’ actions, custom fields, lists, and related tools.
Boscher claims that Unito can “optimize” software licensing and reduce the need for new seats, saving businesses money.
Developers can continue in their preferred software development environment, and business teams can stick with their preferred project management suite, all without having to purchase additional licenses for the purpose of working together.
Successful agile and high-velocity teams know the importance of eliminating hours of copying and pasting by automating as much of the process as possible.
Whether or not this is the case, numerous companies advertise that they have the means to administer SaaS applications. Beamy, a platform that can identify and organize SaaS applications, has just secured $9 million to expand its capabilities.
Torri, supported by investors, aspires to create a community for organizations centered on their cloud applications, allowing them to understand better and leverage their existing software while also discovering new, potentially profitable applications.
In addition to the aforementioned, other SaaS management options include BetterCloud, Lumos, and Paragon. Still, Boscher thinks the emerging market has room to grow.
According to Gartner, by 2021, more than half of companies that use several SaaS apps will use a centralized SaaS management platform to orchestrate and manage their use of all of those apps.
