On March 31, 2021, Productiv, a SaaS Expense and Operations Management company, announced closing of a $45 million dollar C round led by IVP (Insight Venture Partners) joined by current investors Accel, Norwest Venture Partners, Okta Ventures, and new investor Atlassian Ventures. With this round of funding, Productiv has now raised $73 million to support SaaS Management since its founding in 2018.
IVP is known as a growth investor focused on investing in the later stages of growth. Prior IVP investments include Appdynamics, Domo, Dropbox, G2, GitHub, Hopin, Looker, Slack, Tanium, and Zendesk, just to give a flavor of the firm’s background in SaaS, data, and enterprise software, in general.
This round of funding comes at a time when the need for SaaS Management is growing rapidly and SaaS management companies are ripe for acquisition. Amalgam Insights estimates that the global SaaS market will grow to $275 billion in 2025 based on 20% CAGR as the software market continues to grow and as more on-premises software migrates to SaaS. SaaS will make up the majority of new software spend going forward.
In February, SailPoint acquired SaaS operations management company Intello. Earlier in March, LeanIX purchased Cleanshelf to bring SaaS Management into its Corporate IT and Product IT portfolio. Zylo continues to build its executive team with experienced enterprise veterans as it continues to double in size year-over-year. In short, this market is both growing rapidly and seen as an acquisition target by larger security and IT management firms.
In this context, Productiv is holding its own as a leading SaaS management firm. Productiv has doubled its employee count and tripled its revenue over the past year. Productiv is now the second-most mentioned vendor in Amalgam Insights’ SaaS Management inquiries. Over the past year, Productiv has started a free SaaS Management tool, Productiv Essentials, built out a variety of software integrations necessary for IT management and collaboration, and improved analytics and visibility across users, teams, and vendors.
Amalgam Insights’ Take
Of course, Productiv raised this money to sell SaaS Management, but Amalgam Insights expects several specific initiatives going forward.
First, Productiv will improve its partner program to allow more consultancies and systems integrators to build SaaS Management practices around the Productiv product. This represents an opportunity to bring Productiv in through your existing IT managed services providers.
Productiv will also continue to improve real-time insights. It already provides real-time application usage visibility, but Amalgam Insights believes there are additional opportunities to align usage patterns with other corporate metrics, such as project and portfolio management, workforce training, productivity, and budget forecasting as SaaS management supports employee management.
Finally, expect Productiv to start taking fuller advantage of its automated account management capabilities to drive deeper into IT automation. If “there’s an app for that” and Productiv manages all the apps, then Productiv has a lot of administrative and workflow control over the heartbeat of SaaS-using organizations.
Amalgam Insights’ Recommendation
Productiv should continue to be considered as an enterprise SaaS Management vendor with a focus on solving IT challenges. Amalgam Insights continues to recommend Productiv as a potential solution for mid-sized and enterprise IT departments considering SaaS Management solutions and points out Productiv Essentials as a starting point for firms seeking a free introduction to SaaS cost and renewal management.