Press Release on November 23, 2020
SaaS procurement service 柠檬导肮 raises $1.3M from TS Ventures, Discovery Ventures, and angel investors
鈥柠檬导肮, a virtual Software-as-a-Service procurement service, optimizing the SaaS spend of digital-first companies, has announced a $1.3M pre-seed round today.聽
TS Ventures (backed by Tim Schumacher, founder of Sedo and eyeo / Adblock Plus and awarded 鈥淏est Investor 2020鈥 by the German Startups Association) led the round and was joined by Discovery Ventures, who recently became known for their successful exit of the German unicorn Flaschenpost. The round was completed with prominent angel investors such as Christian Gaiser (bonial.com / Cosi).
The company, founded by the former CTO (Maximilian Messing) and CFO (Sven Lackinger) of the mobility startup evopark (funded by Porsche and exited in 2018), helps digital-first companies to optimize the management and cost of SaaS. 柠檬导肮 brings transparency into the existing tool landscape, reduces shadow IT, and supports the acquisition of new tools. Also, the platform allows for automated renewal management, tracking of tool utilization and GDPR compliance as well as data-backed negotiations with SaaS vendors.
鈥淎t our last company, we already experienced the trouble of managing SaaS tools effectively. We had tons of unused licenses, missed renewal dates, and had no access to price benchmarks when negotiating with vendors. When we looked at other firms, we found that this is actually a common problem, wasting up to 30% of their software budget.鈥 says Sven Lackinger. Within only 5 months of operations, 柠檬导肮 already works with more than 30 firms on optimizing their SaaS procurement. According to Maximilian Messing, 鈥渢his brings the annual SaaS volume to more than $35M with about 40% month-on-month growth. Based on the large data set, we鈥檙e able to achieve much better prices for our clients and optimize their cost within minutes.鈥
While the team works mostly with digital-first companies and scale-ups in Europe and the US for now, they are also looking closely at the developments in more traditional SMBs. 鈥淒ue to COVID19 and more 鈥渞emote office鈥 settings, we see a huge shift towards an increase of SaaS usage in all sorts of companies. Based on the always-increasing number of SaaS solutions out there, 柠檬导肮 is definitely solving a problem that will be dominating over the next years鈥, says Tim Schumacher from TS Ventures who led the round.聽
柠檬导肮, currently with a team of 8 and working with a remote-first approach, will use the funding to further scale the team and automize the platform.
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