With a fast-growing customer base and investment from Ridge, Ensemble, TheGP, and others, Clazar is eliminating cloud GTM complexity and catapulting channel expansion with its end-to-end solution
Clazar, the company powering software businesses to sell and grow revenue through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, and GCP), announced it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures and Ensemble VC, with participation from Saurabh Gupta, Managing Partner at DST Global, and existing investors including The General Partnership and Twin Ventures. This brings the total funding to $14 million. Founded in 2023, Clazar is backed by distinguished seed round investors, including Lenny Rachitsky, Vlad Loktev, Vinod Devan, Clara Liang, Kyle Parish, and Neha Narkhede.
“We are excited to support Clazar as they empower SaaS companies to leverage cloud marketplaces. This investment underscores their pivotal role in reshaping GTM strategies and speaks to Trunal and Aayush’s deep experience in this space.”
With cloud marketplaces expected to drive $45 billion in third-party software sales by 2025, Clazar ensures that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) of all sizes can automate all components of their cloud sales and grow revenue through a faster, more cost-efficient route to market. In less than a year, Clazar is already serving a hundred paying customers, underscoring the high demand for its comprehensive GTM automation solution for cloud marketplaces.
Cloud marketplaces unify the convenience of digital, self-serve selling routes with the familiarity of traditional partnerships to bring GTM teams access to high-intent buyers. Buyers gravitate to this channel because it simplifies the process of procuring and onboarding new solutions.
For sellers (ISVs), cloud marketplaces offer access to the locked-in spend of over $340 billion that buyers have committed with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Applying these spends by routing procurement through marketplaces allows for simplified budgeting, speeding up sales cycles by up to 40%. Since buyers are also eager to burn through their commits within fixed timelines, marketplace deal sizes are up to 80% larger and are 27% more likely to close. Mature GTM motions have been shown to drive up to 20% of overall revenue.
However, registration, listing, keeping up with marketplace updates, building interconnectivity between cloud partner portals and incumbent tools like the CRM, and powering and tracking Co-Sell opportunities, all, involve technical complexity and significant resource commitment before they begin yielding results. This is where a Cloud GTM platform like Clazar steps in to accelerate revenue generation.
“The engineering effort and resources required to get started on cloud marketplaces have traditionally been high even for enterprises, and often prohibitive for startups and smaller companies, creating a barrier to entry. But the channel is increasingly critical for success,” said Trunal Bhanse, CEO and Co-founder of Clazar. “Whatever stage a company is in and wherever they are in their cloud GTM journey, Clazar offers an easy, automated, end-to-end solution across all major cloud marketplaces that keeps up with the constant changes happening in the ecosystem. We’re undergoing a generational shift in the way software is bought and sold, and Clazar is helping to catapult the entire industry forward. We’re grateful to our visionary investors and eager to put this Series A funding to work.”
Bhanse observed the cloud marketplace challenge and complexity firsthand when he led an in-house team of engineers to build and manage Cloud Marketplace operations. This experience then formed the basis for Clazar, which he launched with Co-founder CTO Aayush Bahuguna. Both Bhanse and Bahuguna forged their deep expertise in building full-lifecycle marketplace and infrastructure products at AirBnB, and bring a rich legacy of building high-impact solutions at Facebook, Zenefits, and LinkedIn.
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“We’re delighted to be leading Clazar’s recent funding round, aiding the company’s growth as it helps shape the present and future of cloud marketplaces. Clazar is transforming the sales process for software companies going to market. This is an amazing team of people who have experienced the problem firsthand and operate at a different level.”
– Yousuf Khan, Partner at Ridge Ventures
“Trunal and Aayush deeply understand the challenges of cloud marketplaces, and they’re taking all the right steps to modernize the way software is sold. As we’re seeing cloud marketplaces increasingly drive billions in purchases annually, we’re excited to double down on our investment in Clazar and continue to work alongside their top-notch team.”
– Dan Portillo, Co-founder, The General Partnership
“We are excited to support Clazar as they empower SaaS companies to leverage cloud marketplaces. This investment underscores their pivotal role in reshaping GTM strategies and speaks to Trunal and Aayush’s deep experience in this space.”
– Conrad Shang, Managing Partner, Ensemble VC
“Twin Ventures is thrilled to double down on our investment and partnership with Clazar. Since we participated in its seed round in May 2023, it has been incredible to witness the caliber of execution of the Clazar team in enabling their customers to seamlessly sell their software across all cloud marketplaces.”
– Swapnil Shinde, Managing Partner, Twin Ventures
With Clazar, software businesses can launch, grow, and scale Cloud GTM with minimal engineering and no operational resource commitment. Benefits for software sellers include:
- Going live in just weeks instead of months, with Clazar managing buyer registration, pricing, technical integration, and integration testing. Clazar also enables easy private offer transactions, usage tracking, and metering to build transaction volume and quicken time-to-value.
- Expansion from single to multi-product listings and enabling Co-Selling via the hyperscalers through a single platform without compounding cost, time, and effort.
- Day-to-day transaction seamlessness and data integrity with best-in-class bidirectional syncs between partner portals and business tools like your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce) and other essentials.
- Data-driven decision-making and monitoring, with a complete view of buyers and contracts and comprehensive insights into multi-marketplace performance and revenue.
Unlike other industry players, Clazar’s pricing plans are based on the number of private offers generated, and not on the revenue closed via marketplaces.
“We aim to democratize cloud GTM access for software businesses by automating the ‘opportunity to cash’ lifecycle of every deal, straight from product discovery through a public presence on the hyperscaler marketplaces to the SalesOps and transaction orchestration that make a deal happen,” said Aayush Bahuguna, CTO and Co-founder of Clazar.
Clazar follows a philosophy of building not just for but also with its customers. Fresh funds will enable the business to invest in R&D and product innovation, helping it continue to expand offerings alongside a rapidly growing customer base and meet its demands. Clazar will also use the funds to expand its GTM teams and continue driving new customer growth.