SaaS startup Zluri in talks to raise $15-20 million in Series B funding round

Zluri's funding deliberations come at a time when top SaaS firms are feeling the heat from tight macroeconomic conditions triggered by the US Federal Reserve's rate hikes, amid rising inflation. In fact, firms like Freshworks and Chargebee have announced layoffs to save costs and weather the macro pressures.

“There is of course a market slowdown but companies like Zluri are placed in a better position. They not just offer products for the US market but also for India and other South Asian markets for enterprise and SMB (small and medium business) clients,” said one of the people quoted above.

“Many companies are now cutting down their spends, especially SaaS spends and are looking for software that helps them in saving costs and manage their SaaS offerings better. That's why Zluri is a mission-critical platform,” the person added.

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.

In January 2022, the company raised its Series A round of funding, securing $10 million from Kalaari Capital and Endiya Partners. Prior to that, during its seed stage funding in 2021, the firm had raised approximately $2 million from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital. Zluri partially competes with companies like OneTool, BetterCloud, Torii, Blissfully, and Vendor.

If Zluri's fundraising goes through, it will mark only the sixth mid-stage (Series B and Series C) SaaS deal of 2023, which is in stark contrast to 2022 when mid-stage companies raised over $1.4 billion across 34 deals, according to data by Tracxn Technologies.

SaaS emerged as one of the most promising sectors in 2021, surpassing the challenges faced by the overall startup ecosystem during the funding winter of 2022. While funding to the startup ecosystem declined by 60 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year, SaaS companies experienced a relatively smaller drop of around 35 percent, according to Tracxn data.

However, since the start of 2023, SaaS has seen a huge drop in funding amid worsening macroeconomic headwinds. In the first five months of 2023, funding to SaaS platforms dropped 81 percent from the same period in 2022, Tracxn data showed.