Xensam AB, a Swedish startup that assists companies with managing their software assets using artificial intelligence, today announced it has raised its first-ever external funds in a $40 million growth funding round led by London-based Expedition Growth Capital.

Founded in 2016, the company provides an AI-powered platform that allows Information Technology teams to track, manage, monitor, identify and reduce overspending on applications across business networks. Its platform is capable of handling software tools across organizations of all sizes and can identify thousands of different applications including software as a service, cloud, on-premises or across hybrid environments.

As more enterprise businesses have pushed themselves towards digital transformation the number of different applications floating around organizations has exploded. This means that organizations have applications, licenses and other pieces of software within their networks costing money and creating issues that they may not be fully aware of.

According to the Productiv 2023 State of SaaS report, companies reached an all-time high in the use of SaaS apps with 371 on average. The report said that per employee spending on SaaS alone would reach $9,600 per employee, although 53% of licenses went unused. Unlike licenses for other types of applications, a large part of SaaS pricing comes from usage, meaning that monitoring and optimizing its use can save companies a lot of money in the long run.

“We founded Xensam to provide an intuitive platform for software asset management and resource optimization by leveraging AI and automation,” said Oskar Fösker, co-founder and chief executive of Xensam.

Using AI technology, Xensam’s platform helps relieve the tremendous manual work that’s required to track and identify the growing number of apps that get installed on company networks. According to the company, it can track and identify hundreds of thousands of applications using its trained AI and can integrate with any software to provide additional data in a security console as a single source of truth.

In an era where many IT departments face issues of expiring licenses and rogue employees loading their software into the network opening up compliance issues with potentially pirated software, this could save companies many headaches. At the same time, the platform can warn about missing antivirus and security tools to help reduce the chances of security breaches, the company said.

“By pioneering AI from the start, we’ve transformed SAM for hundreds of companies, making it user-friendly and removing manual work,” said Gustav Fösker, co-founder and chief technology officer of Xensam. “With the new funding, we can continue to innovate the platform with more advanced features, including a ChatGPT-inspired chatbot that will enhance its accessibility and user experience.”

Photo: Pixabay