Japanese SaaS management startup Josys Inc. has raised $93m in Series B funding.
The company, which was launched in February 2022 by Yasukane Matsumoto, founder of Raksul Inc., offers a platform for centrally managing SaaS usage. Teams can access tools from vendors like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft from one place, allowing companies to track how much they spend on each of these services.
Despite its relative infancy, Josys has already attracted over 300 customers, boasting big names such as Sony, Panasonic, Rakuten, and SoftBank.
This latest funding brings its total raised to $125 million, coming about a year after its initial $32 million Series A in September 2022. The Series B funding was backed by existing investors Global Brain and a new investor, Globis Capital Partners.
In addition to its SaaS management capabilities, the Josys platform also includes hardware device management, enabling the company to position itself as “the one-stop IT operations platform for new-age businesses.”
Since its Series A round last year, Josys has also added a Shadow IT discovery feature, enabling users to discover unregulated software usage. If unauthorized or unsanctioned applications are added to the enterprise environment, shadow records are automatically created. IT admins can then choose to accept these records to convert the resource from unauthorized to authorized, or delete if the resource is deemed unsafe.
The platform integrates with 100+ SaaS apps, HR systems, IDPs, and other cloud systems to capture information about devices, users, and applications, and enable tracking and management. It also discovers all the users and devices connecting to the network, automatically mapping every device and app to one or more authorized users, and creates records for each resource from one or more sources.
“Organizations across the globe are struggling to modernize their operations and catch up with the technological and human shifts that have transformed how and where work gets done. At Josys, our vision for ‘Better Systems, Better World’ drives us to reimagine the traditional IT operations playbook for the hybrid work era and deliver a next-generation LifecycleOps platform to help companies of all sizes establish efficient and secure practices for managing their applications and devices.”
Yasukane Matsumoto, founder of Raksul Inc., and Josys Inc.
This is yet more evidence of the growing maturity of the burgeoning SaaS Management Platforms (SMP) sector, reflecting a surge in demand for such solutions as companies attempt to get to grips with their ever-expanding SaaS portfolios. Just last month we reported that the SaaS management startup Zluri had raised $20 million in its own round of Series B funding, while Torii announced series B funding of $50 million last year.
Josys points to the COVID-19 pandemic as an accelerant for SaaS usage, but the trend was already moving strongly in that direction before 2019, so it is perhaps no surprise to see such a surge in investment in these solutions.
The inclusion of hardware asset management within the Josys platform and Shadow IT discovery is likely to be a compelling proposition for customers. We will be following Josys with interest.