Arnie Bellini Is Back, Invests $9.2M In TechGrid: CRN Exclusive

‘MSPs are being held back by a dated approach to the tech stack,” Arnie Bellini tells CRN. ‘There are too many siloed solutions that trap them into specific vendors. We’re at the start of a journey to bring back choice so MSPs have more solutions to choose from, can work across silos and can double their productivity and revenue.’

ConnectWise founder Arnie Bellini has officially re-entered the channel with a $9.2 million investment in TechGrid, a quoting, procurement and billing tool to further help MSPs sell to customers.

“MSPs are being held back by a dated approach to the tech stack,” Bellini told CRN. “There are too many siloed solutions that trap them into specific vendors. We’re at the start of a journey to bring back choice so MSPs have more solutions to choose from, can work across silos and can double their productivity and revenue.”

Bellini founded Tampa, Fla.-based ConnectWise in 1982 as an IT service provider. Over time it transformed into a software vendor and was sold in 2019 to private equity powerhouse Thoma Bravo. Since 2019, Bellini has been a managing partner in Bellini Capital but has not been officially in the channel due to a five-year noncompete agreement with ConnectWise. That noncompete ended in February.

With the Series A investment from Bellini Capital, TechGrid streamlines workflows for selling, fulfilling and managing IT solutions delivered to businesses. The seed funding round came from seven other CEOs.

“It’s simplifying the quoting and procurement process to your end customers as a managed service provider,” Bellini said. “With a client, it’s quoting, procuring, doing and then billing. TechGrid has a very interesting and aggressive take on all of that. They simplify quoting and procurement, they provide the billing and connect to everything that you need to do in the center.”

The company’s automation platform is comprised of three elements designed to assist MSPs:

Marketplace, in which partners are directly integrated into the process of the service provider; Workflow software: a configure, price and quote (CPQ) engine with embedded finance combining hardware and licensing, services, applications and internet access into a subscription model; and Commerce, a platform that centers around a digital catalog that stores products, services, apps and internet access for the MSP to build solutions and sell via traditional quotes or online stores.

“TechGrid is pretty impressive,” William Higgins, VP of Information Systems at Torrance, Calif.-based MSP VectorUSA, told CRN in an email. “At this point, this platform has exceeded our expectations. If TechGrid can do 80 percent of what we're asking and I believe that it can. Then we're 80 percent more efficient than we were before, and I believe that's a win.”

TechGrid also connects to some of the major software vendors, including ConnectWise, that help the data flow together. “It automatically improves streamlines. It takes a lot of the work out of quoting. You’re taking a lot of the burden off a lot of administrative people,” Bellini said.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based company will have Philip Wegner as CEO with Bellini on the board of directors.

“He started creating the solution to solve his own internal problem,” Bellini said of Wegner. “I love those solutions that are discovered out of your own needs because those always tend to be the very best. That was how I created ConnectWise. I was trying to fix my own business.”

Wegner ran SecurEdge MSP for 15 years and started building the software that became TechGrid.

“It was born out of our stuff not connecting together,” Wegner told CRN. “We were trying to sell to customers in a modern way and we couldn’t. That’s where we started building software. We weren’t intending to make it available for the industry. We did that after we got feedback from other people.”

Wegner sold SecurEdge in 2021 and has since been in “stealth mode” building out TechGrid for the industry.

“You have to solve the connectivity problem,” he said. “I don’t mean selling a customer a network, I actually mean connectivity of the partners and the software in the industry. The average MSP is using 40 different software tools to run the company, and then those tools aren’t talking to each other. The first problem you have to solve is how do I connect partners and apps together on one platform.”

The second problem that needs solving, Wegner said, is building digital workflows for selling, fulfilling, managing and financing.

“The problem we have in the industry is that the average business customer can order a pizza and have real-time tracking,” Wegner said. “But they can’t order something from most tech service providers and get anything at all. We’ve got a customer experience problem that we have to solve.

“The majority of service providers still do not sell online,” he added. “The reason why is they need the infrastructure to do that. We’ll continue to build solutions like that to try to bring the way that they’re selling online.”