By Andrew Lindsay, VP of Corporate and Business Development, HubSpot
When Dharmesh and Brian founded HubSpot in July 2006, there was no IT department — they were the IT department. SaaS applications weren’t being as widely adopted as they are now. Managing the company’s on-premises IT applications was pretty straightforward back then.
HubSpot has since grown to more than 2,400 employees and our SaaS adoption has exploded. As the number of apps we’re using has grown, it has also become harder to manage what technologies are in use across our teams and departments.
Which tools are most popular?
Are there opportunities to consolidate contracts?
When you deeply value bottom-up decision-making, like we do at HubSpot, balancing individual autonomy with centralized management of IT use can seem like an impossible challenge.
Many of our SMB customers are facing the same challenge of managing SaaS activity and spend, often with a smaller IT team than we have. Today, the average SMB is using 18 cloud services, which can result in cost-inefficiency, security risks, and workflow challenges. All of these factors together can add up to a real headache for IT departments.
Enter Blissfully.
Managing SaaS Chaos
Blissfully aims to solve today’s IT department SaaS management challenge by tracking and managing SaaS applications throughout an organization in real-time. The product allows IT teams to track SaaS spending by department, organize SaaS use by teams, and establish a full audit trail of IT purchases. The product’s automation and workflow features also help to easily onboard new employees onto the right IT applications.
Blissfully is focused on the SMB segment of the market and shares our commitment to helping those businesses grow better, so we’re confident that Blissfully’s technology will be valuable to our thousands of customers.
That’s why we’re thrilled to be participating in Blissfully’s $3.5M seed-plus round, led by Hummer Winblad.
The Road to Partnering
At HubSpot, our connection to Blissfully actually precedes both companies’ foundings. Our SVP of Product, Christopher O’Donnell, went to high school with Blissfully’s CTO, Aaron White. They then went on to co-found a SaaS pricing strategy company together, Price Intelligently (now ProfitWell), in 2012. So, there’s some history here.
When Aaron and co-founder Ariel Diaz started Blissfully in 2016, we knew to keep a pulse on what Blissfully was building.
Beyond the value of the product itself to our own company, Blissfully has a front row seat to tracking SaaS market trends, based on user activity across its wide base of customers. (You can check out the team’s latest annual market report here.)
We see the opportunity for data like this to guide our expansion of HubSpot’s app ecosystem, helping us partner with the SaaS providers that will most delight our customers.
Ensuring that we have seamless integrations to SaaS tools used by our customers brings us one step closer toward our mission of becoming a lovable platform.
This funding round is a meaningful step in Blissfully’s history, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Please join me in congratulating Ariel, Aaron, and the Blissfully team on the new round of funding. We’re honored to be a part of your story, and we look forward to building a partnership together.
