While the cloud removes much of the hassle and complexity associated with maintaining and managing an application, that ease of use means you can lose control of your usage and spending just as easily. Intello wants to help your company track and manage all that information in a dashboard. Today, it announced $1.3 million in seed funding.
Companies tend to track this data using a variety of tools like spreadsheets for renewal dates and Box or Dropbox to store their contracts. They might be using calendar reminders when contracts are due for renewal, says company co-founder and CEO Barak Kaufman. He says that he saw this first-hand in his former job working on an investment team at Insight Venture Partners, and he recognized there was a need for a dedicated tool to manage all of this. It was the impetus to launch a company of his own.
Kaufman says Intello gives the CFO or head of IT, whoever manages the software spend, full visibility in a central place of usage, spend and contractual details, including renewal dates. He says the tool also gives companies insight into Shadow IT, the notion that employees can easily sign up for these services on their own without IT’s knowledge or approval. This is particularly important in terms of understanding where sensitive data might be stored, especially with GDPR privacy rules coming into effect in May of this year in the EU.
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They gather the information from a variety of partners, including accounting systems — they currently support NetSuite and QuickBooks out of the box, but plan to add others over time. They also can look at Okta to see the sanctioned apps companies are using in their single sign-on tool. Finally, they have a browser extension to help capture ad hoc usage. Kaufman notes this tool only goes into action on B2B apps. It wouldn’t capture information on social networks, for instance.
The company launched a year ago and has five employees and 60 customers. They plan to add a number of engineers in the coming year and begin to build out a sales and marketing team.
The round was led by Emerge, with participation from BoxGroup, Blacktop, Kaedan and Tectonic, along with InVision founder Clark Valberg, The Muse founder Kathryn Minshew and Sense360 founder Eli Portnoy.