Cledara Ltd., a startup helping companies manage the software-as-a-service applications used by their employees, today announced that it has secured a $20 million funding round.

The Series A round was led by CommerzVentures, a venture capital firm focused on the financial technology market. Nauta Capital, Notion Capital, Carbide Venture and Massive contributed as well.

The London-based company provides a software platform that makes it easier for companies to manage the SaaS applications used by their employees. The platform lists the SaaS applications deployed throughout a company in a centralized dashboard. According to Cledara, finance teams can consult the dashboard to identify quickly any duplicate or unused cloud subscriptions that could be removed to reduce costs.

Cledara’s platform helps with a number of other tasks as well. The platform enables finance teams to create multiple virtual credit cards for purchasing SaaS applications. It provides the ability to use a separate card for each SaaS subscription, an approach that the startup says makes it easier to cancel subscriptions when the need arises. 

Cledara visualizes a company’s SaaS spending in graphs to help finance teams monitor software expenses. Users can track how spending changes over time, as well as forecast future costs. 

According to Cledara, its platform can save about 15 hours of manual work per month by easing the day-to-day tasks involved in managing a company’s SaaS applications. Moreover, the startup promises to reduce companies’ cloud expenses in the process. The startup offers a 2% cashback on many SaaS purchases made using its virtual credit cards. 

The company argues that its platform is useful not only for corporate finance professionals but also information technology teams. According to the startup, its platform’s features for tracking the SaaS products used throughout a company make it possible to find applications that were deployed without the IT team’s approval. Moreover, it offers a tool for ensuring SaaS products meet cybersecurity requirements. 

Cledara has built up a customer base of more than 800 organizations since launching in 2018. To continue its growth, the London-based startup will use the proceeds from its latest funding round to establish a bigger presence in the US. It will also use a portion of the capital to develop new features.

Cledara is one of several venture-backed startups working to reduce the manual work involved in managing SaaS applications. Push Security Ltd. closed a $4 million seed round in July to help companies secure the cloud services used by their employees. Earlier, Vendr Inc. raised $150 million for its SaaS application procurement platform. 

Image: Cledara