SaaS firm Zluri raises $20 million funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners

From L-R - Chaithanya Yambari, Ritish Reddy, Sethu Meenakshisundaram

Business-to-Business (B2B) software service management platform, Zluri on Thursday announced that it has raised $20 million in its Series B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture partners.

This comes at a time when venture capital firms are keeping caution and have slowed down funding activity in the last few months to brace the macroeconomic pressure.

Moneycontrol was the first to report the developments of this fundraise on the 26th of May.

Zluri's funding round also saw participation from its existing backers, MassMutual Ventures, Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital. With the new funding, the company has now raised $32 million in total venture funding since 2020.

The SaaS firm will utilise the funding to expand generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in enterprise SaaSOps (SaaS Operations) with Zluri’s new product called CoPilot - an intelligent assistant to boost efficiency and productivity across enterprises using no-code workflows.

"We started with core capabilities of SaaS management platform which includes discovery, management, automation and security of applications...and now we have got a demand for automation of access audits so we will be focussing on this area with the new investment," said Ritish Reddy, cofounder of Zluri in an interaction with Moneycontrol.

Access audits are part of Zluri's new identity governance tool which will help teams streamline on/off-boarding and access request management, Reddy added.

The company's 60% of revenue comes from the US market and Zluri is looking to expand further into the US and the UK markets.

"We are expanding our go-to-market (GTM) teams like the US and the UK, this is one of the areas where the majority of our investments will go," said Reddy.

San Francisco and Bengaluru-based Zluri was founded in 2020 by Ritish Reddy Puttaparthi, Sethu Meenakshisundaram, and Chaithanya Yambari.Before teaming up to launch Zluri, the three co-founders worked together at immersive gamification software company Knolskape. Zluri enables a company's IT teams to discover, manage, secure, and comply with multiple SaaS applications from a single dashboard.

It helps its users manage all software application contracts and renewals, and create an approval process to reduce spending by analysing data to negotiate and maximise ROI (Return on Investment). The startup claims to have added other SaaS startups like Chargebee, MoEngage, and Whatfix as its customers.

Since their Series A in January 2022, Zluri has doubled the overall team size, it said in a statement. It has also made its entry into the US market including setting up an office in California.

With the new funding, the firm is planning to hire more employees in specific roles.

"We are actively hiring are some roles, we have even made some senior leadership hires in the past few months...We are looking for people in product marketing, sales, data engineering and for our R&D teams," Reddy said.

Zluri raised its Series A round in January of 2022 led by MassMutual Ventures with participation from existing investors, Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital. It had previously raised $2M, from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital, in its seed round in January 2021.

Zluri wants to grow its revenue by 5X and plans to introduce newer products in the SaaS management space and in the Identity governance administration space.

"We have grown 10X in the last few years and we expect to grow 5X. The reduction in expectation is due to the base and not due to the overall slowdown in the economy...We are very optimistic about the growth of Zluri," Reddy said.