Torii is a company that helps IT professionals gain total control over managing SaaS applications with the world’s first automation-centered SaaS management platform. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Torii co-founder and CEO Uri Haramati to learn more about the company.
Uri Haramati’s Background
Haramati has always considered himself a builder at heart, whether that applies to woodworking or creating new software. And Haramati said:
“It’s the reason I launched an entrepreneurship program while attending college and why I have founded multiple startups.”
“That said, it took me a while to view my entrepreneurial passion as a viable career path. After receiving my business administration degree from Reichman University, I was hired by Deloitte where I spent nearly three years as a senior consultant in the financial services advisory department. While I enjoyed the role, my desire to build something new continued to grow. The first iteration of that was as a freelance financial consultant, but I quickly realized that I was meant to start a company. With a blend of nerves and excitement, I took the leap of faith by founding Life on Air, the parent company behind apps such as Meerkat, Houseparty, and Skedook.”
“I want to take a moment to reflect on the heart of entrepreneurship. At our core, entrepreneurs are innovators committed to improving lives by adding something new or addressing overlooked problems. Throughout my journey across various companies, a persistent problem always surfaced— the challenge of unmanaged cloud applications. Recognizing this, in 2017, together with my co-founders Uri Nativ and Tal Bereznitsky, we established Torii, the first SaaS Management Platform built for IT professionals.”
Formation Of Torii
How did the idea for Torii come together? Haramati shared:
“Honestly, problems are difficult to identify in the abstract. You have to experience the pain firsthand. For me, that pain came because I am extremely intentional about organization. Whether it is my physical workspace or the digital one, I always want to maintain an organized structure. While there are many SaaS tools that allow you to organize your work, I found there weren’t many effective methods for organizing those SaaS tools themselves. This meant that SaaS spending was always increasing, but efficiency would sometimes actually suffer. No one, not even IT, knew the true state of the SaaS stack, who was using it, how often, whether or not it was secure, and what steps we needed to take to optimize it. I searched for a solution but never found one that checked all the boxes for effective SaaS management.”
“At the same time, I noticed several trends starting to take place. First, SaaS applications were becoming more and more prevalent in business settings. This gave rise to a second trend: legacy systems being left behind. However, IT departments continued to function as if these outdated systems were still in play, resulting in a disconnect between what companies offered and what employees required for productivity. Plus, due to the rise of dispersed and often remote workforces, SaaS applications were getting increasingly harder to track and control.”
“All of this is ultimately what inspired me to leave the consumer tech space and embark on the creation of Torii. My goal was to develop a comprehensive platform that would not only grant visibility into tech stacks but also supply IT teams and other SaaS stakeholders with the necessary insights to take effective action. I knew that if my network of IT-minded professionals and I were searching for this kind of solution, others would be too.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Haramati explained:
“The true power of Torii is that it gives IT professionals the tools to finally tackle their SaaS sprawl with confidence. It gets them out from under the reactive, ticket-responding workplace and into a state of true autonomy. We give them complete visibility, cost-saving insights and automation, open API access, and a whole suite of AI tools to help ease workloads, reduce costs, and save valuable time.”
“While many companies don’t even realize they have a SaaS problem, data shows that most organizations have 300-600 SaaS apps in use across various teams, up to 75% of which are acquired without IT’s knowledge, creating security risks, clunky employee experiences, and wasted spend. Torii solves all of these challenges as the one software to manage all software.”
“Powered by generative AI, Torii offers IT teams a one-stop shop to unify, analyze, and manage their entire SaaS ecosystem. This means organizations can better control IT costs and generate powerful insights that can help inform budgeting conversations in a world where every dollar counts.”
Evolution Of Torii’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Haramati noted:
“A lot has changed since Torii was founded in 2017 – both in terms of how businesses operate and how Torii has evolved its platform to keep pace with our customers’ evolving needs.”
“SMPs are no longer niche, the market is almost expecting them to do a bit of everything—that’s why we switched to an open platform, which allows us to meet that lofty goal.”
“Because our platform is uniquely open, IT professionals can tailor-fit Torii to their needs and create one place to manage all their software. Now, users can build any action, custom application, integration, and more with the most robust developer community and resource library on the market, sharing new innovations and collaborating with other IT pros.”
“Likewise, access to a first-of-its-kind Plugin Marketplace allows IT pros to integrate data from external systems directly into Torii, enabling nuanced insights and workflows that were never available before in SMPs but are needed to solve pressing SaaS challenges. This new feature offers a unified approach to data insights by allowing users to directly access information from specialized tools like Ramp, Panorays, and Jamf, all within the Torii platform.”
“We’re leveraging the latest technology to make Torii work for IT teams, reducing burden by leaving generative AI to automatically discover and map SaaS applications, enable advanced automation, immediately answer any SaaS question and more. As more organizations rely on SaaS tools to collaborate and complete tasks efficiently, Torii’s AI-powered SMP platform enables bandwidth-strapped IT teams to automate time-consuming tasks, cut SaaS spending, and power quicker, actionable insights.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Haramati cited:
“We have achieved many key milestones as a business over the past few years. From a product perspective, we are very proud that Torii has emerged as the only SaaS Management provider with a truly open SaaS platform. The enhanced platform boasts endless ways to ease IT workloads and eliminate wasted SaaS spend in a secure and scalable fashion – from the ability to build and organize complex workflows to automate any SaaS task, to AI components that enhance a SaaS system of record while eliminating manual data entry. Our first-to-market generative AI-powered capabilities are a significant step towards Torii’s mission to become the one platform to manage all software solutions.”
“Beyond our technology, there have been many moments that have made me very proud of the Torii team and the company we have all built. In September 2023, Torii received top customer satisfaction scores and was named the #1 rated SMP vendor by G2’s SaaS and Operations Management report for the 7th time in a row. We were also recognized by the Stevie Sales & Customer Service Awards for our outstanding customer success.”
“Our industry-leading technology and customer-centric approach have resonated with esteemed investors. In February 2022, we announced a $50 million Series B investment led by Tiger Global, bringing our total funding to $65 million.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Haramati about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Lunchbox, an online ordering company, used to manually track and manage SaaS adoption and costs in a spreadsheet, a painstaking and error-prone process. Since implementing Torii, Lunchbox has experienced massive time savings, as well as $430,000 in unused or duplicative licenses. Additionally, before Torii, Gian D’Intino-Conte, Director of IT at Lunchbox had to manually offboard each user from every app they were associated with on IT’s spreadsheet. D’Intino-Conte said: ‘With Torii, I’ve saved over 40 hours – a whole work-weeks’ worth of time – just in offboarding tasks. Before, our SaaS management was like the wild west. Once I plugged in Torii it revealed exactly what our SaaS landscape looked like.’”
“Gorillas, an on-demand delivery startup, turned to Torii because it was drastically overspending on cloud and SaaS applications during the pandemic, a time when many companies turned to a distributed workplace. Torii helped Gorillas save hundreds of thousands of euros in just one year, and eliminate more than 1,000 hours in onboarding and offboarding time. After deploying Torii in 2021, the company instantly found hundreds of unused licenses. Bobby Abdullah, who oversees IT projects & governance at Gorillas, said, ‘We were able to communicate all this information to the right stakeholders and tell them what cost-saving measures to take. This saved Gorillas hundreds of thousands of euros in software and licenses for the first fiscal year.’”
“CD Baby, the leading online distributor of independent music, used Torii to uncover unused licenses and automate workflows. Tom Beohm, VP of IT at CD Baby says, ‘Torii is the only solution that discovers all our SaaS apps and automates any SaaS management task. It’s elegant and easy to use out of the gate, with a level of customer support that’s rare in this industry.’”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Torii from its competition? Haramati affirmed:
“As the only open SMP powered by generative AI, Torii is redefining SaaS management and setting new standards for the industry. Our latest platform release solves all the SaaS management problems IT teams face – from SaaS sprawl, to optimizing costs, to automating IT tasks such as securely onboarding/offboarding employees. Torii distinguishes itself from its competitors through its exceptional ability to reduce IT burden and SaaS noise. Individual Torii customers have saved more than $1 million per year on unused SaaS apps. Plus, with its workflow automation, Torii has reduced manual IT time spent on SaaS management by at least 75%.”
“Torii not only stands out for its use of generative AI, but as the industry’s only fully open platform. The platform’s robust API explorer empowers developers to effortlessly interact with and extend its capabilities, making it a game-changer for businesses seeking tailored solutions and ensuring companies’ SaaS Management investments scale alongside their evolving needs. Additionally, Torii’s user-friendly and intuitive interface makes it accessible to both IT professionals and non-technical users, offering actionable insights and recommendations that optimize SaaS usage and spending. Torii’s proactive approach distinguishes it from platforms that focus solely on reporting.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Haramati concluded:
“Our vision was always to be the one software to manage all software, and we are now actively turning that vision into reality through our new innovations. As a company, we are continuing to expand our product offerings to address the ongoing challenges IT teams face. We are dedicated to enhancing our platform’s capabilities, leveraging cutting-edge AI and automation technologies to deliver even more streamlined, data-driven insights. This commitment to innovation will continue to drive us forward, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of the industry, delivering on our promise to be the go-to software for managing all software.”
