Software-as-a-service management startup Zluri Technologies Private Ltd. has closed on a $20 million funding round that brings its total amount raised since its founding in 2020 to $32 million.

Today’s Series B round was led by Lightspeed and saw the participation of existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital.

India-based Zluri is the creator of a comprehensive SaaS operations platform that’s used by companies to discover, manage, optimize, secure and automate their use of SaaS applications through a single dashboard. The startup is helping companies deal with the problem of SaaS sprawl.

According to Zluri co-founder Ritish Reddy, the average large enterprise typically uses more than 1,100 SaaS applications across its organization/ That causes major headaches for information technology teams, which have no effective way to manage and orchestrate spending and security.

One of the main causes of SaaS application sprawl is that users in different departments simply add SaaS subscriptions when they need them. Reddy explained that, at his previous startup, the IT department had an Excel spreadsheet listing about 70 SaaS tools used by various company employees

However, an annual audit showed the company was in fact paying subscription fees for more than 200 applications, and in many cases actually had more licenses than it required. Reddy’s research later showed that other companies were in a similar situation, struggling to keep track of how many SaaS apps they’re using.

“Enterprise SaaS consumption trends have led to under utilized licenses, compromised security, ineffective governance and overall suboptimal management of SaaS stacks for IT and security teams,” Reddy said.

Zluri’s software helps to resolve SaaS sprawl through a comprehensive application discovery engine and library of more than 800 SaaS integrations. This gives companies precious visibility into who is using what, enabling them to build a complete directory of all of the SaaS licenses they’re paying for.

The capabilities also extend to management and optimization, providing IT teams with details of when subscriptions are due for renewal, and details on how many employees are using a specific tool, helping to ensure the company isn’t paying for unnecessary licenses.

Security is another concern Zluri deals with. One danger with SaaS is that individual users often give permissions to software providers without considering the company’s internal compliance and security regulations. Zluri’s platform counters this with controls for managing access across SaaS apps.

Finally, Zluri provides automation tools that help automate manual tasks, such as when an employee leaves the company and access to various SaaS apps must be disabled. Doing this manually across several hundred apps is incredibly time-consuming, but Zluri says its automation can cut this manual work.

Today, the company said, it’s extending the capabilities of its platform with the launch of a new CoPilot feature that relies on generative artificial intelligence to streamline the process of onboarding and offboarding workers, along with their data and workflows.

Zluri’s concerns over SaaS sprawl are shared by industry analysts such as Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc., who told SiliconANGLE that SaaS has been incredibly beneficial to enterprises in recent years. “SaaS is so useful and so popular that enterprises no longer know how many SaaS apps they’re running or paying for,” he said. “So it makes sense to use a SaaS app to get their SaaS apps under control.”

Zluri, which raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding in January 2022, has doubled the size of its overall team since then. It has also made deep inroads into the U.S. market, opening its first office in California. Zluri said it now counts more than 250 enterprise customers globally, including Monday.com Ltd., Razorpay Software Private Ltd., Catapult Group International Ltd., SmartNews Inc. and Traveloka Group.

Lightspeed Partner Dev Khare said he’s looking forward to collaborating with the team as it transforms SaaS management and identity governance for midsized and large enterprises. “Zluri has demonstrated strong market traction, driven by an innovative architecture addressing the twin drivers of cybersecurity and pressure on IT to reduce cost,” he said.

The funds from today’s round will be used to expand its platform’s generative AI capabilities and scale up its go-to-market teams in the U.S. and Europe.

Image: Zluri