Spendflo is a company that helps companies manage all of their SaaS vendors in one platform and streamline approval workflow by informing them when contracts are up for renewal, who owns them, and how much they are saving on them. Recently, the company announced an $11 million Series A funding round and to learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Siddharth Sriddharan, CEO and co-founder of Spendflo.
Siddharth Sriddharan’s Background
Siddharth Sriddharan has a background in RevOps, SalesOps, and BizOps. And most recently, Sriddharan was the head of BizOps at Volta Charging, California as an integral part of their Series A to IPO journey.
Idea Behind Spendflo
The idea for Spendflo surfaced while Sriddharan was running business operations at the Californian electric vehicle specialist Volta Charging in 2021. Every quarter, the chief financial officer at Volta Charging pointed out that the company was spending too much on SaaS solutions, but Sriddharan did not know who owned the contracts or how they were using them.
So Sriddharan got fed up and realized he could not be the only one with this problem. And then Sriddharan teamed up with co-founders Ajay Vardhan and Rajiv Ramanan to commercialize a solution.
Essentially, Spendflo solves 3 problems:
— A lack of visibility
— The sheer chaos caused by multiple stakeholders involved in the buying, negotiation, and renewal processes
— Price and usage opacity of their SaaS stack
Through Spendflo, companies can now track all of their SaaS tools and subscriptions in a single location. And the solution provides crucial data on how much the business is spending on each subscription as well as when contracts are due to be renewed. More importantly, it provides usage data so the business is able to see whether it’s getting the maximum possible ROI.
Challenges Faced In Building The Company
What were some of the challenges that Spendflo faced in building the company?
“Our biggest challenge was figuring out the right approach to solve the SaaS buying, negotiation, and management problem for our customers since all other solutions weren’t taking a unified approach to this,” said Sriddharan. “We spent a lot of time to understand how we can build the right product for our customers so that Spendflo evolves at the rate our customers want it to—and scale alongside them.”
Core Features
What are Spendflo’s core features? Spendflo streamlines the SaaS contract negotiation process, saves companies hours of time, and offers complete visibility to evaluate and optimize their stack. And the platform’s core features can be categorized into three hubs: the Buying Hub, Management Hub, and Security Hub.
Spendflo’s Buying Hub feature simplifies the SaaS buying, negotiation, and renewal process with accurate benchmark pricing and a centralized contract dashboard that provides complete visibility into the SaaS stack. And Spendflo also offers assisted buying to negotiate SaaS tools to the right price and powerful approval workflows that automate the buying process.
Spendflo’s Management Hub offers real-time, granular insights that help companies track SaaS usage and identify areas of overspending, eliminating excess spending right away. And companies can monitor app adoption trends and sentiments to make the right decisions about renewal, cancellation, or renegotiation of SaaS contracts at the right time.
Plus Spendflo’s Security Hub helps companies onboard 100% compliant and secure SaaS vendors. And Spendflo helps collate all essential security documents and accelerates the security review cycle by setting timelines for each stakeholder. Plus security concerns can also be flagged and resolved faster.
Evolution Of Spendflo’s Technology
How has Spendflo’s technology evolved? Spendflo’s first version was built on AWS Amplify (powered by Google Sheets). And from its humble beginnings on a low-code app builder, Spendflo has now expanded to cater to customer requirements across SaaS buying, management, and vendor security.
“We constantly worked with our customers, and built the product entirely on their feedback—no fluff, no unnecessary feature additions. I believe Spendflo is a great example of customer-led success today,” Sriddharan added.
Most Significant Milestones
When I asked Sriddharan about the company’s most significant milestones, he cited 3 events:
— Going through Accel Atoms, a program set up by the global venture capital firm Accel to support start-up businesses with pre-seed finance.
— Putting together an entire leadership team before our seed round was a great milestone and set the stage for Spendflo’s accelerated growth.
— Hitting their first million in revenue – which was a special one since it was quantifiable validation that their customers believe in them 100%.
Customer Success Story
When I asked Sriddharan if he could share a customer success story, he brought up Wodify. Wodify is a cutting-edge gym and studio management software that helps over 2 million members of over 5,000 businesses in 100 countries get fitter and healthier. Sriddharan noted that they were overspending on their SaaS and were having a hard time gaining visibility over areas that are costing them the most. Wodify decided Spendflo was the best solution in the industry for their problems, and the results were “incredible.”
Through Spendflo, Wodify was able to view all their SaaS stack information on a single platform and gather insights on their spends and usage—and completely eliminate last-minute negotiations which drained time and resources. Sriddharan said that they have saved over 100 hours so far and have gained 12 times ROI on their SaaS buying process in just a month.
Revenue Growth
Has Spendflo been seeing notable revenue growth?
“Spendflo has experienced a hockey-stick growth trajectory since its inception and established a solid global presence, serving customers across North America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East. Spendflo has grown 30% month on month since the start of 2022, multiplying its revenue 15 times, growing its customer count by 5X, and expanding the team size fourfold,” replied Sriddharan. “I’m proud, but not very surprised at our rate of growth, and I’m confident that we can hit numbers that are much higher.”
Differentiate From The Competition
What differentiates Spendflo from the competition? Spendflo is an all-in-one solution that solves challenges at every stage of the SaaS procurement lifecycle, including buying, management, and security. And other alternatives in the market remains a point solution focusing on just one of the three major challenges, resulting in three times the cost, effort, and resources involved for a business to tackle one problem.
“Moreover, juggling between three different systems to solve one problem is counterintuitive to the goal of saving time and money for fast-growing businesses,” Sriddharan explained. “Spendflo remains the truly complete solution that helps modern businesses buy, manage and secure SaaS on autopilot. Seamless sharing of data between its SaaS buying, management, and security hubs streamlines SaaS buying, automates workflows, accelerates buying cycles, and saves up to 30% of a company’s annual SaaS expenses.”
Future Company Goals
What are Spendflo’s future company goals?
“With the current funding budget, we aim to deploy more resources towards strengthening our team, rapidly evolve the product offering, and expand our go-to-market (GTM) efforts in the North American region,” Sriddharan concluded.
