Meta SaaS is a product that helps you cancel other products. Like Cardlife and Cleanshelf, Meta SaaS looks at all of your software-as-a-service subscriptions and tells you which ones you use and, more important, which ones you don’t.
Founded by Arlo Gilbert and Scott Hertel, the product raised $1.5 million in seed from Mark Cuban with participation from Barracuda Networks, Capital Factory, Deep Space Ventures and Brett Hurt of Bazaarvoice. Gilbert created the first VoIP platform for iOS, iCall, and Hertel worked in Dell’s e-commerce division.
They are supporting 10,000 employees at six customers – including RetailMeNot – and they are managing millions of SaaS apps.
“We are focused on the mid-market and larger companies, where the SaaS license management issue creates meaningful financial impact, to the tune of millions of dollars wasted per year. Most early stage competitors are focused on smaller customers,” said Hertel. “Many other competitors get their data through third parties such as Okta, which means they are limited to tracking logins and shackled to a single platform.”
Gilbert created the company after realizing that he had been paying way too much for SaaS.
“As I was closing down the office after the sale of iCall in 2012, I realized I had 40 licenses for Salesforce CRM but had never had more than 20 employees total,” he said.
The product manages “phantom IT” – namely the IT tools that someone bought and forgot about. While this one weird trick of selling and forgetting is great for SaaS providers it’s awful for businesses and Meta SaaS is one of the first providers to tackle the enterprise and large business space.