With a fast-growing customer base and
investment from Ridge, Ensemble, TheGP, and others, Clazar is
eliminating cloud GTM complexity and catapulting channel expansion
with its end-to-end solution
Clazar, the company powering software businesses to sell and
grow revenue through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, and GCP),
today announced it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round
led by Ridge Ventures and Ensemble VC, with participation from
Saurabh Gupta, Managing Partner at DST Global, and existing
investors including The General Partnership and Twin Ventures. This
brings the total funding to $14 million. Founded in 2023, Clazar is
backed by distinguished seed round investors, including Lenny
Rachitsky, Vlad Loktev, Vinod Devan, Clara Liang, Kyle Parish, and
Neha Narkhede.
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240418928704/en/
Clazar announces a $10M Series A led by
Ridge Ventures & Ensemble VC. The funds will go towards product
innovation in democratizing and automating Cloud GTM. Trunal
Bhanse, CEO, and Aayush Bahuguna, CTO, are the Co-founders of
Clazar. (Photo: Business Wire)
With cloud marketplaces expected to drive $45 billion in
third-party software sales by 2025, Clazar ensures that Independent
Software Vendors (ISVs) of all sizes can automate all components of
their cloud sales and grow revenue through a faster, more
cost-efficient route to market. In less than a year, Clazar is
already serving a hundred paying customers, underscoring the high
demand for its comprehensive GTM automation solution for cloud
marketplaces.
Cloud marketplaces unify the convenience of digital, self-serve
selling routes with the familiarity of traditional partnerships to
bring GTM teams access to high-intent buyers. Buyers gravitate to
this channel because it simplifies the process of procuring and
onboarding new solutions.
For sellers (ISVs), cloud marketplaces offer access to the
locked-in spend of over $340 billion that buyers have committed
with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Applying these spends
by routing procurement through marketplaces allows for simplified
budgeting, speeding up sales cycles by up to 40%. Since buyers are
also eager to burn through their commits within fixed timelines,
marketplace deal sizes are up to 80% larger and are 27% more likely
to close. Mature GTM motions have been shown to drive up to 20% of
overall revenue.
However, registration, listing, keeping up with marketplace
updates, building interconnectivity between cloud partner portals
and incumbent tools like the CRM, and powering and tracking Co-Sell
opportunities, all, involve technical complexity and significant
resource commitment before they begin yielding results. This is
where a Cloud GTM platform like Clazar steps in to accelerate
revenue generation.
“The engineering effort and resources required to get started on
cloud marketplaces have traditionally been high even for
enterprises, and often prohibitive for startups and smaller
companies, creating a barrier to entry. But the channel is
increasingly critical for success,” said Trunal Bhanse, CEO and
Co-founder of Clazar. “Whatever stage a company is in and
wherever they are in their cloud GTM journey, Clazar offers an
easy, automated, end-to-end solution across all major cloud
marketplaces that keeps up with the constant changes happening in
the ecosystem. We’re undergoing a generational shift in the way
software is bought and sold, and Clazar is helping to catapult the
entire industry forward. We’re grateful to our visionary investors
and eager to put this Series A funding to work.”
Bhanse observed the cloud marketplace challenge and complexity
firsthand when he led an in-house team of engineers to build and
manage Cloud Marketplace operations. This experience then formed
the basis for Clazar, which he launched with Co-founder CTO Aayush
Bahuguna. Both Bhanse and Bahuguna forged their deep expertise in
building full-lifecycle marketplace and infrastructure products at
AirBnB, and bring a rich legacy of building high-impact solutions
at Facebook, Zenefits, and LinkedIn.
“We’re delighted to be leading Clazar’s recent funding round,
aiding the company’s growth as it helps shape the present and
future of cloud marketplaces. Clazar is transforming the sales
process for software companies going to market. This is an amazing
team of people who have experienced the problem firsthand and
operate at a different level.” – Yousuf Khan, Partner at Ridge
Ventures
"Trunal and Aayush deeply understand the challenges of cloud
marketplaces, and they’re taking all the right steps to modernize
the way software is sold. As we’re seeing cloud marketplaces
increasingly drive billions in purchases annually, we’re excited to
double down on our investment in Clazar and continue to work
alongside their top-notch team.” – Dan Portillo, Co-founder, The
General Partnership
“We are excited to support Clazar as they empower SaaS companies
to leverage cloud marketplaces. This investment underscores their
pivotal role in reshaping GTM strategies and speaks to Trunal and
Aayush’s deep experience in this space.” – Conrad Shang,
Managing Partner, Ensemble VC
“Twin Ventures is thrilled to double down on our investment and
partnership with Clazar. Since we participated in its seed round in
May 2023, it has been incredible to witness the caliber of
execution of the Clazar team in enabling their customers to
seamlessly sell their software across all cloud marketplaces.” –
Swapnil Shinde, Managing Partner, Twin Ventures
With Clazar, software businesses can launch, grow, and scale
Cloud GTM with minimal engineering and no operational resource
commitment. Benefits for software sellers include:
- Going live in just weeks instead of months, with Clazar
managing buyer registration, pricing, technical integration, and
integration testing. Clazar also enables easy private offer
transactions, usage tracking, and metering to build transaction
volume and quicken time-to-value.
- Expansion from single to multi-product listings and enabling
Co-Selling via the hyperscalers through a single platform without
compounding cost, time, and effort.
- Day-to-day transaction seamlessness and data integrity with
best-in-class bidirectional syncs between partner portals and
business tools like your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce) and other
essentials.
- Data-driven decision-making and monitoring, with a complete
view of buyers and contracts and comprehensive insights into
multi-marketplace performance and revenue.
Unlike other industry players, Clazar's pricing plans are based
on the number of private offers generated, and not on the revenue
closed via marketplaces.
“We aim to democratize cloud GTM access for software businesses
by automating the ‘opportunity to cash’ lifecycle of every deal,
straight from product discovery through a public presence on the
hyperscaler marketplaces to the SalesOps and transaction
orchestration that make a deal happen,” said Aayush Bahuguna,
CTO and Co-founder of Clazar.
Clazar follows a philosophy of building not just for but also
with its customers. Fresh funds will enable the business to invest
in R&D and product innovation, helping it continue to expand
offerings alongside a rapidly growing customer base and meet its
demands. Clazar will also use the funds to expand its GTM teams and
continue driving new customer growth.
About Clazar
Clazar is the cloud GTM co-pilot for software businesses of all
sizes. List, Manage, and Co-Sell on cloud marketplaces — AWS,
Azure, and GCP — with minimal engineering effort. With Clazar, you
can go from setting up to driving revenue via cloud marketplaces
within weeks, manage your cloud channel in one place, and run
Co-Sell directly from Salesforce and HubSpot without revenue
sharing or cap on marketplace revenue. Organizations like
Secureframe, ApolloGraph, CloudZero, The Linux Foundation, Monte
Carlo, Tabular, Imply, Wallarm, and many others use Clazar to sell
more on cloud marketplaces faster.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240418928704/en/
Media Contact Sara Black sara@bospar.com 213-618-1501