Ask any enterprise customers and they will tell you how expensive it is to run a SaaS application on the cloud. Gartner projected that in 2023 alone enterprises saw about 21% increase in spending. In extreme cases, the average spend surged by up to 500%. 

This is where YC-backed CloudEagle comes into the picture. 

The San Francisco-based AI startup offers a SaaS management and procurement platform designed to help organisations optimise their software spending and streamline the management of their SaaS applications.

“A customer who spends between $1 and $2 million on SaaS applications can see 10% to 30% savings using CloudEagle,” said Prasanna Naik, co-founder of CloudEagle and a former Airbnb and Oracle exec, in an exclusive interaction with AIM.

Further, he said that the company has started experimenting with AI and generative methods in multiple areas, as it has access to data from thousands of companies. 

“We have a database of around 250,000 SaaS applications, and it’s continuously growing, so the data keeps growing and our engine becomes stronger,” said Naik.

“We know how much a company with 300 employees is paying for Salesforce compared to one with 2500 employees for the same number of licenses,” he said. Naik added that the company has built a recommendation engine that suggests which application enterprises should use based on their use cases, current tech stack, industry, employee base size, and employee growth over the past couple of months or years.

Furthermore, the company utilises generative AI, enabling users to check their subscription expiration for a specific application directly within Slack. Users can type their inquiries into the Slack chatbot, which promptly generates the required information. The company is currently building its own proprietary LLM for this. 

It also uses AI in contract management systems. “Our AI is able to extract all the details from contracts, including start, end, and renewal dates,” said Naik, adding that the company also keeps a history of previous contracts.

Streamlining Your SaaS Expenditure

CloudEagle was founded in 2021 by Prasanna Naik and Nidhi Jain. Jain has previously worked in various capacities at notable companies such as Box, ServiceNow, and Goldman Sachs. 

Their motivation to start the company stemmed from their observations of the inefficiencies in software procurement processes at their previous workplaces. 

CloudEagle’s key solutions include SaaS management and SaaS procurement. The former gives customers a complete view of their SaaS applications. 

“With CloudEagle, IT department personnel can quickly spot what specific app employees use,” said Naik. He illustrated that if, say, 250 employees don’t use Salesforce in a company, CloudEagle promptly alerts the IT team to trim their licenses.

Further, he said that CloudEagle helps connect to various data sources, such as SSO and finance systems, and browser plugins make this possible. “Today, CloudEagle has more than 380 integrations,” said Naik, adding that this eliminates the need for manual tracking and spreadsheets.

On the other hand, SaaS procurement automates the process of purchasing new SaaS licenses. “CloudEagle automates manual tasks related to SaaS procurement, including approval workflows for new subscriptions and automatic reminders for renewals. This saves time for the IT and finance teams,” added Naik.

CloudEagle vs the World 

BetterCloud, Spendesk, Zylo, Torii, Flexera, Cledara, Productiv, Sailpoint, Vendr, and Tropic are among CloudEagle’s top competitors. Naik said that these companies are version 1 SaaS management or basic SaaS procurement services companies.

“CloudEagle is not just a SaaS management and procurement company; it is moving beyond that. The company has introduced a new feature called Automated License Harvesting,” said Naik. 

The feature automatically detects when licenses are not actively used. For instance, if a user has not logged into an application for a specified duration, the system identifies this license as a candidate for harvesting.

“It runs weekly or monthly, according to the customer’s needs. We have automated this process, so companies no longer need to hire three more IT engineers or finance professionals continuously,” added Naik. 

CloudEagle has added another new feature, called Employee Onboarding. When an employee joins the company, CloudEagle automatically assigns them applications like Hubspot, Zoom, Jira and Slack.

“Everything related to SaaS has to happen on CloudEagle,” concluded Naik, adding that the company will introduce new features like Access Review, which will be able to determine the access type a particular employee has for any application and not just license type.