There’s always that one pesky streaming platform or monthly delivery service on your credit card statement that makes you say: “Ugh, I meant to cancel that.”
Software subscriptions and renewals are a pain for individuals. But they are a massive frustration for businesses.
After payroll and real estate, SaaS products are the biggest line items for companies of all sizes. Even pre-pandemic, companies were spending hundreds of thousand of dollars annually on SaaS subscriptions, though that number could have grown with hybrid and remote work.
Each employee might have a paid account for a couple dozen of SaaS tools (think Slack, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Zendesk, Canva, Adobe, Google, Atlassian, Trello, Zoom, Google Ads, and so on). But traditionally, there is very little visibility from an enterprise level into what accounts are open, which tools are redundant, and how many are set to expire soon.
Software spend and usage is at the core of LeaseQuery’s latest acquisition. The Atlanta-based and venture-backed startup announced today that it has acquired Stackshine, a San Francisco startup that was part of the 2022 Y Combinator class.
First, a little refresher on LeaseQuery. The startup was founded in 2011 by George Azih with the goal of making accountants’ lives easier through technology. Its first products were all about streamlining lease accounting compliance and management and getting those processes out of clunky Excel documents. The startup was bootstrapped until late 2019 when it received a $40 million Series A capital injection from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division and Valor Ventures. BIP Capital is also listed as an investor, per Crunchbase.
The Stackshine acquisition marks the next chapter of growth for the Atlanta-based team.
“At LeaseQuery, we use over 150 SaaS applications, so we felt this pain ourselves. We started searching for a solution several months ago and came across Stackshine. The product is robust and the founders were fantastic to work with,” Chief Strategy Officer Christopher Ramsey told Hypepotamus. “Additionally, while evaluating the market and deciding we had an opportunity to solve the challenge of SaaS spend management, we decided it was a great opportunity to acquire Stackshine. This acquisition allows us to put our full resources behind sharing it with the 7,000+ organizations we already work with, and introduce it to the rest of the world.”
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Stackshine’s leadership team will integrate into LeaseQuery.
This is LeaseQuery’s second acquisition in as many years. It most recently acquired Crowe Lease Accounting Optimizer in May 2022.
And now in the second half of 2023, Ramsey said that the company is focused on leveraging AI across its suite of tools.
“Earlier this year, we enhanced our flagship lease accounting software with AI to assist with lease entry, empowering accounting teams to reduce errors and spend less time on data entry, so they can focus their time on more strategic job functions,” he said.
Ramsey also added that LeaseQuery will be focused on “enhancing and expanding” its partner program, which saw a 287% revenue growth rate overall and a 92% growth rate on new customer opportunities between 2021 and 2022.
And good news for job hunters: LeaseQuery appears to be looking to expand its 300 employee headcount as well, as the startup’s job board is currently filled with positions across engineering, sales, analytics, and customer experience.
