SaaS Management Provider Cleanshelf, backed by LAUNCHub, aquired by LeanIX

Cleanshelf is a leading enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) management solution with more than 3,000 integrations and it currently manages $700 million in SaaS spend for its customers.

Cleanshelf is focused on tracking, controlling, and benchmarking SaaS applications. The SOC 2-compliant and AI-powered technology help companies save up to 30% on their SaaS spending by automatically identifying unmanaged contracts, duplicate licenses, and wasted cloud software subscriptions.

Cleanshelf is based in San Francisco with subsidiaries in Denver and Ljubljana (Slovenia). The company founded in 2017 by CEO Dusan Omercevic has closed an $8 million Series A funding round by Dawn Capital and LAUNCHub Ventures in March 2020.

When LAUNCHub Ventures made their first bet on Cleanshelf in 2018, they were impressed with the team’s ambition and immense grit to grow the business. Within the following year Cleanshelf grew their ARR 1,000%+, and worked with clients like Hilton, JAMF, AT&T, and Looker. During Series A Academy (an internal program run at LAUNCHub Ventures for the portfolio to help founders go from Seed to Series A) they were really active and met their next investor. This led to $8 million Series A led by Dawn Capital, announced in the middle of an economic downturn. This next step in Cleanshelf’s growth, which is great success not only for the team, but also for the whole startup ecosystem in CEE.

Stanislav Sirakov, Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures: “Ever since we invested in Cleanshelf we have observed the value its product provides to CIOs and CFOs in different organizations. This was also recognized by LeanIX and its investors (Goldman Sachs and Insight Partners invested in the last round of the acquiring company). It’s another proof of our strategy to invest in the best companies coming out of our region and building commercial teams in the most developed markets. The exit is a significant one, not only for Launchub Ventures, but for the whole Slovenian ecosystem and contributes to the good performance of our fund, which is placed in the top quartile of funds in Emerging Europe.

The software provides an automated view of all SaaS applications in an enterprise, simplifying management and enabling resource optimization.

Cleanshelf is a perfect complement to LeanIX's Application Portfolio Management and solves the problem CIOs and CFOs face keeping track of a company’s decentralized software tooling ecosystem. With the Cleanshelf acquisition, LeanIX is now the first provider in the enterprise architecture industry to offer its customers an out-of-the-box solution for SaaS management.

The market for SaaS tools has expanded dramatically in recent years. There were just five SaaS providers listed on the stock exchange in 2012, and there are now more than 100. 70 percent of companies are currently investing in SaaS and public cloud offerings and will continue to do so, according to a recent Gartner I&O Leaders Survey. Whether it's Zoom, Teams or Slack, COVID-19 has further accelerated the adoption and heavy use of SaaS offerings in enterprises.

The rapid expansion of online subscriptions to a wide variety of SaaS applications is mostly decentralized, making it difficult for companies to keep track of increasing expenditures as well as security and data protection. SaaS spending per employee is continuously increasing, as is the total amount of this spending. For CIOs and CFOs, the use of suitable SaaS management platforms is becoming increasingly important in order to gain transparency over decentralized IT purchases, without losing the benefits of quick access to software applications available online.

With Cleanshelf, customers save an average of 15 percent of their SaaS spend in the first year by discovering unused licences. The technology is based on extensive integrations with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, spend and contract management solutions, identity and single-sign-on (SSO) providers, and automatically identifies SaaS applications used in the enterprise.

The combination of over 3,000 integrations with more than three years of training data makes Cleanshelf technology unique. The data is supplemented with individual licence information and KPIs on the use of SaaS tools. This allows companies to optimize licence usage, make the right decisions about licence renewals and identify where application usage is not meeting expectations. Extensive data is also available for IT security to identify which SaaS solutions are not secured with the company's SSO, and to automate the regular review of user access and terminations.

"Cleanshelf SaaS management and LeanIX's Application Portfolio Management complement each other perfectly," explains LeanIX CEO André Christ.

"For large organizations, the new offering increases the level of automation and thus also the data quality of their application portfolio, which is a permanent challenge with traditional EA tools. Smaller and younger companies can now manage their application portfolio even faster, as they can rely on a direct capture of their SaaS landscape without having to go through a lengthy roll-out", says André Christ, LeanIX CEO.

Cleanshelf founder and CEO Dusan Omercevic will drive product development in SaaS management as LeanIX VP Product SaaS Intelligence and Managing Director Slovenia. He will also lead the Slovenian office in Ljubljana, which employs a large part of the previous Cleanshelf development team. "We are excited to become part of the LeanIX family," he emphasised. "We have a strong enterprise focus with our fully SOC2-compliant technology. This vision is a perfect fit for LeanIX - the Google Maps for IT. And, we can deliver immediate value to the entire LeanIX customer base", declares Dusan Omercevic Cleanshelf CEO. 

Cleanshelf investor Dawn Capital becomes a new shareholder in LeanIX. This comes only nine months after an $80 million Series D funding of LeanIX led by Goldman Sachs, and with participation from Insight Partners and DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners).

To implement the acquisition, Cleanshelf was supported by GP Bullhound as exclusive financial advisor. PwC and Mintz acted as legal advisors to LeanIX.

Starting May 1, Cleanshelf's technology will be available as a new product called "LeanIX SaaS Intelligence" and will primarily support CIOs, CFOs, IT procurement, IT managers and IT security teams in managing all SaaS applications in the company. Enterprise architects will have the SaaS discovery and cataloging functionality available as a free component of the LeanIX Application Portfolio Management module in Q2 2021. 

LeanIX is not only expanding its Continuous Transformation Platform with the Cleanshelf acquisition. Today, the company also introduced its newly developed offering for CTOs and product IT teams - Microservice Intelligence. With Microservice Intelligence, LeanIX enters the fast-growing DevOps space and offers reliable transparency on all microservices, its owners and dependencies with the automated cataloging of microservices.

With the SaaS Intelligence and Microservice Intelligence modules, LeanIX now offers IT management and IT teams suitable solutions in addition to its successful Enterprise Architecture Suite and Cloud Intelligence module to enable continuous transformation. The modules of the LeanIX platform can be seamlessly linked with each other, and can be used independently by executives, IT managers, solution architects, DevOps teams and leaders of Cloud Centers of Excellence.