At Lightspeed, we are proud to lead the Series B in Zluri and look forward to many years of partnership with Ritish, Chaithanya and Sethu, as well as with our coinvestors Sateesh, Vani and Anvesh. I can give more details on the company but these are better covered in their financing announcement and on their website.
So, how did we get here? Well, we got to know each other over time.
Rohit Chennamaneni introduced me to Ritish Reddy during the pandemic in September 2020 when they were in the midst of raising the seed round for Zluri. At that time, Ritish and his cofounders Chaithanya and Sethu had just left Knolskape after each investing six to nine years there.
What really stood out to me then was how the three of them had worked together for years and had been in the room when strategic decisions were made at their previous company. What also intrigued me were the complementary skillsets and experiences they had, across technology, sales and marketing in SaaS. This is a team that knows how to build, market and sell.
I looked at my meeting notes from 2020 and the years post that. Some things are very consistent about Zluri:
- a clear, current and growing problem and large surface area, namely SaaS sprawl of 300 to 1000 apps per enterprise, leading to cost, security and employee productivity issues- all enduring themes not specific to this moment in time.
- a large addressable market covering all SaaS applications deployed at any large enterprise globally, annual spend of $300B in cloud/SaaS.
- a set of older vendors with older architectures, some more than a decade old from the “Asset Management” world.
- an architecture that was purpose-built as a platform to integrate and collect data while supporting multiple use-cases like discovery/control, spend management, identity governance and more.
While we usually partner with founders at the seed or Series A stage, in this case, our friends at Sateesh and Vani ended up leading the seed round and then Anvesh led the Series A.
After the pandemic had passed, Ritish and I kept meeting, sometimes in San Francisco, as I had moved to the city, and sometimes in Bangalore. And the results kept coming in, on plan, which to say the least, is unusual in the venture world.
When we got the latest update from the team in early 2023 and then dug into the market opportunity and the company’s performance, we felt we had to partner with the founders. In addition, we continued to be excited by the quality of the management team and their platform approach and scalable architecture.
We are looking forward to supporting Ritish, Sethu and Chaithanya in their journey to impact scale!
~ Dev, Anuvrat and Prateek
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