SaaSOps Standout BetterCloud Secures $75 Million In New Funding

As work-from-home mandates are driving a surge of interest in its SaaS management platform, the startup will invest in building out product capabilities as well as fostering greater understanding of the emerging category of SaaSOps.

BetterCloud revealed Wednesday it had closed a $75 million funding round, an infusion of cash that will partly be spent on expanding market awareness of the rapidly emerging but still not well-understood SaaSOps category.

Warburg Pincus, a private equity investor that believes in “category creators,” led the latest round, which brought total funding for the New York-based startup founded in 2011 to $187 million, Shreyas Sadalgi, BetterCloud’s chief strategy officer, told CRN.

BetterCloud has seen a surge of enterprise interest since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, as CIOs and business leaders have been pressed to recognize the benefits of digital transformation through Software as a Service, as well as the challenges of managing a large cloud portfolio.

[Related: Microsoft Leads $101B SaaS Market Followed By Salesforce, Adobe]

“The future of work is finally here for everyone,” Sadalgi said. “Every company in the world has been forced to change how they work. We’re seeing the capabilities we offer are even more relevant.”

Born in the Google ecosystem, BetterCloud in recent years has expanded its platform’s management capabilities from Google G Suite to a wide swath of best-of-breed Software as a Service, including Office 365, Salesforce and Dropbox.

That evolution took BetterCloud from supporting 10 applications in 2017 to more than 50 currently, as well as offering a flexible platform, called Integration Center, for integrating unsupported applications into the console.

The larger trend of digital transformation with SaaS has been spurring product development and formation of the technology partnerships critical to the platform’s adoption.

Last year, BetterCloud struck a close alliance with Dropbox that also involved a $5 million investment from the file sharing giant in its business. The company also has partnered with OneLogin and Okta, as identity and access management are crucial in enabling SaaSOps processes.

With the latest funding, BetterCloud will accelerate product development to expand the number of integrations and SaaSOps use cases, he said.

“Deep integrations and go-to-market partnerships,” Sadalgi said. “That’s what we’re going to do more of.”

SaaSOps starts with discovering a cloud application portfolio. Then comes managing those apps, and finally securing the mission-critical ones where sensitive data lives, Sadalgi said.

“We want to double down to make sure we fully satisfy all the use cases across a SaaSOps framework,” he said.

But the term “SaaSOps,” now formalized by most analysts into its own category, remains nebulous, which has limited the cohesion of a community of customers and partners, Sadalgi said.

BetterCloud will invest in fostering broader awareness around the new category through its sales and customer success teams. That will include creating certifications for its ecosystem.

While most of its systems integration and reseller partners still are closely aligned with Google’s ecosystem, BetterCloud hopes to expand that channel by on-boarding new partners with identity and mobility management expertise.

The coronavirus crisis has created an economic climate that is illustrating the importance of the technology in enabling remote work and IT management.

Large enterprises that didn’t believe in SaaS transformation are now coping with a lack of visibility, auditability and control over tools they had to rapidly adopt to meet the needs of unexpectedly dispersed workforces. That’s provided a strong validation of the need for SaaSOps in general, Sadalgi said.