SaaS Application Management Platform BetterCloud Busts Through Challenging Period to Land $60M Round

SaaS operations management platform BetterCloud has closed a $60 million Series E funding round led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. The capital will be leveraged to scale sales and marketing and accelerate product innovation within the platform.

“We’ve come a long way in the past year, but with any platform, you’re going to have a nearly unlimited number of capabilities you could build into it,” CEO David Politis tells Hypepotamus.

“We’ve received thousands of feature requests from customers, and are focused on building platform capabilities that help customers design their own solutions.”

Atlanta and New York-based BetterCloud serves IT professionals at large organizations. When an employee leaves a company, in order to cut access off to SaaS apps like G Suite, Office 365, Dropbox, Slack, and more, IT must move through 50+ actions to gain back control of the data and access.

BetterCloud streamlines the tasks behind cutting off access, transferring ownership of assets, and assuring data security. It allows employees to use the company’s SaaS applications while also giving IT security control of that environment.

“Next is getting in front of more IT professionals,” says Politis. “We’ve really been the best kept secret the past few years and this funding enables us to go out to a much bigger market in a bigger way.”

However, the road to market recognition and building a focused product that solves security issues wasn’t an easy one for the BetterCloud team.

Though they spent two years and $35 million in rebuilding the platform to move from solely managing and securing G-Suite apps to a multi-SaaS app management platform, the work and risk did not immediately pay off. In early 2017, the team received negative feedback from customers about complicated pricing, skepticism about how well it worked, and confusion surrounding its features.

Politis listened and synced up his findings with the sales team in order to unify the new product’s messaging and capabilities to gather more leads.

“The biggest change was simplifying our pricing so that anyone purchasing the new platform gets access to an unlimited number of connectors,” says Politis. “We made the change within three months of launching the platform and one week of getting the feedback.”

“We also simplified our messaging throughout 2017 to focus in on use cases that were proving most popular with customers, like automated employee off-boarding,” says Politis. “The platform is capable of almost anything, but we needed to present use cases that the market could quickly understand.”

By late 2017, the team was signing multiple million-dollar contracts and had seen 70 percent increase in quarter over quarter sales of the new platform. Politis knew the company was ready to seek more funding, and with strong sales numbers as they could show the product worked.

“Raising a round of funding from leading venture capitalists is never easy, but when you can connect them with customers who love your product and use it every day, that goes a long way,” says Politis. “Our investors talked to dozens of companies using the new platform, and our team proved our success at scale with our sales results in Q3 and Q4 of last year.”

As CEO during this uncertain time, Politis led his lean team with transparency and a focus on concrete goals that showed short-term progress to keep motivation and productivity up.

“You have to keep focusing on goals that show we’re making progress,” says Politis. “We set milestones like getting our first hundred customers on the new platform and releasing the most requested connector, and were 100 percent transparent about what we had to do each step of the way to get to the next step so that we’re all in the same boat.”

Moving forward, BetterCloud is about to enter a hiring spree in both their Atlanta and New York offices.

“We are announcing a key integration and a significant new platform functionality over the next couple of months,” says Politis. “We’re also hiring across the board in both our New York and Atlanta offices. We actually have dozens of roles open in 10 different departments right now with sales leading the pack.”

This round brings BetterCloud’s total funding to $107 million.

Photos provided by BetterCloud