Zylo Inc. says the average company using its platform has more than 400 software-as-a-service subscriptions. Managing so many products without creating any unnecessary costs is a difficult proposition, which is the reason investors are betting $9.3 million on the startup.

Announced today, the round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from the investment arms of Salesforce.com Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc. They believe that Zylo can help companies become more efficient in how they consume cloud services.

The startup’s platform provides a dashboard for tracking the SaaS offerings in use throughout an organization and how much they cost. To do so, Zylo combines data from a company’s expense management systems with utilization data about each service. Companies can glean whether or not they have more subscriptions than employees can use, or if there are more subtle inefficiencies in need of addressing.

One such potential issue is poor user experience. According to Zylo, its platform includes a tool for collecting employee feedback that enables companies to assess how workers feel about given service. The feature addresses the fact that an application that hinders productivity can hurt the bottom line just as much as, if not more than, excess cloud spending.

Zylo also includes features for handling the more everyday aspects of managing SaaS subscriptions. The platform has, among other things, a console for tracking when subscriptions are due to renew and an alerting feature that notifies administrators of important events.

Zylo said it manages more than $1 billion worth of cloud subscriptions for customers. The startup will use the capital from the newly announced round to try to grow that business, as well as step up feature development.

According to Forbes, one of the items on the roadmap is to create tools that enable SaaS providers to help their customers optimize spending. That may have been one of the considerations that drove Salesforce and Slack to join the investment.

The two cloud giants’ backing is especially significant because many other startups compete in the same area as Zylo. One of the newest is Boulder, Colorado-based Alpin Inc., which in December launched a rival platform for tracking cloud costs. Other players include Cleanshelf Inc. and Meta SaaS Inc., which both raised new funding in 2017.

Image: Zylo