Chicago-based software review and marketplace company G2 Crowd recently raised $100 million in funding and the company announced its first acquisition: Siftery. Siftery is a company that helps businesses eliminate waste in software spend and discover new applications based on the tech stacks used by peer companies. The terms of this deal were undisclosed.
Essentially, Siftery connects with customers and networks to provide insight into how much each software product or service is actually getting used. So companies can determine whether money is being wasted on licenses.
Photo Credit: Siftery
According to Netskope, the average enterprise runs 1,246 cloud services and it is growing at 10% each year. And Siftery estimates that an average organization uses 55 software-as-a-service tools, which more than doubled over the last three years. And G2 Crowd pointed out that $1.4 trillion was spent on software and services last year. In the U.S. and U.K. alone, there was an estimated $34 billion in waste.
Launched in 2015, Siftery raised about $4.1 million in funding prior to the acquisition according to Crunchbase. Siftery’s twenty employees are joining G2 Crowd, including co-founders Vamshi Mokshagundam (CEO) and Ayan Barua (CTO). And Abel told TechCrunch that Siftery has 1,500 customers, most of whom use a free version of the product.
“We’re excited to join the G2 Crowd team so we can more quickly realize our joint vision,” said Vamshi in a statement. “By becoming part of the G2 family, Siftery’s technology can reach millions more people, continue to develop rapidly, and have a bigger impact around the world in helping to eliminate wasted and inefficient software spend.”
G2 Crowd currently has 550,000 reviews about software on the site across 60,000 products in 1,200 categories. And about 2 million business professionals visit G2 Crowd every month.
Siftery’s technology complements the G2 Crowd Review Platform and Marketplace. Business use that platform to find, compare, and purchase software. And Siftery’s data is going to eventually be integrated into G2 Crowd. However, it will be kept separately for the time being. After the integration happens, businesses will be able to analyze, track, and optimize their software spend.
An example of how this could work is by helping businesses learn whether it has a “shadow IT” problem. For example: if three separate teams buy 50 licenses to a software solution, then they can find ways to save money by buying a single 150 license subscription at half the price.
“We believe that everyone in business deserves the right to reach their potential — and the only way they can do that is through a trusted marketplace that’s free to access, and is not pay-to-play,” added Abel. “Every day, new and potentially disruptive technologies and services are released into the world. Anyone who wants great software to perform at their best, from intern to CEO, should be able to quickly discover, buy, and manage the best technology for their business.”
