Software-as-a-service buying platform startup Vendr Inc. revealed today that it has raised $150 million in new funding to accelerate platform development and to help organizations cut costs when it comes to managing software.

The Series B round was co-led by Craft Ventures and SoftBank, with Sozo Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Sound Ventures, Tiger Global and Y Combinator also participating. Although the valuation wasn’t formally disclosed, Bloomberg reported that the round valued the company at $1 billion. Including the new funding, Vendr has raised $216 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Founded in 2019, Vendr offers a buying platform used by companies to purchase SaaS. The platform provides commercial negotiations, renewal management and contract logistics services by negotiating software purchases. The company also helps clients improve their bottom line by keeping track of information relevant to managing their SaaS stack.

Vendr pitches its benefits as including the ability to increase the return on software investment. The company’s service is designed to allow users to maximize the value of their SaaS investments by assisting in the initial decision-making and evaluation through the negotiation and purchasing process.

Based on best practices and data from tens of thousands of deals across thousands of software providers, Vendr’s service also reduces risk. It automatically detects and tracks software used throughout the organization to identify potential applications that don’t meet internal security requirements or create unknown attack vectors.

Another advantage of Vendr’s offering, according to the company, is that it provides protection from lapsed renewals, duplicative purchases and shadow spending — reducing the attack surface by identifying legacy, duplicated or otherwise “orphaned” software subscriptions for decommissioning.

On the compliance side, Vendr ensures software providers meet security and compliance requirements by coordinating security reviews and leveraging proprietary data on security and compliance information from top software companies.

The company has seen strong growth, processing more than $1 billion in software spending and delivering more than $200 million in software savings for its customers.

“Everyone tells you to cut costs when the economy shifts, but no one tells you how. We’re the how,” Ryan Neu, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vendr, said. “We’ve handled over 10,000 software transactions for our customers and learned that most companies overspend on software by 20% to 30%. We have the buying repetition and data to get our customers a fair price and in fact, we guarantee to save them more than we cost, achieving a nine times return on investment for them on average.”

Image: Vendr