Press Release on November 23, 2020
SaaS procurement service Sastrify raises $1.3M from TS Ventures, Discovery Ventures, and angel investors
Sastrify, 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.
TS Ventures (backed by Tim Schumacher, founder of Sedo and eyeo / Adblock Plus and awarded “Best Investor 2020” 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. Sastrify 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.
“At 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.” says Sven Lackinger. Within only 5 months of operations, Sastrify already works with more than 30 firms on optimizing their SaaS procurement. According to Maximilian Messing, “this brings the annual SaaS volume to more than $35M with about 40% month-on-month growth. Based on the large data set, we’re able to achieve much better prices for our clients and optimize their cost within minutes.”
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. “Due to COVID19 and more “remote office” 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, Sastrify is definitely solving a problem that will be dominating over the next years”, says Tim Schumacher from TS Ventures who led the round.
Sastrify, 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.
Want to know more? Reach out to us via hello@sastrify.com