European Pioneer in SaaS Management Beamy Raises $9M

Beamy, a European pioneer in SaaS management for large companies, has raised more than 9 million dollars in Series A funding.

The solution has already attracted notable customers including LVMH, Decathlon, Orange, Engie and BNP Paribas to provide a framework for governing the decentralisation and implementation of their SaaS tools across their businesses

Beamy, a scale-up featured in “Future 40” of STATION F, offers companies a unique solution that can detect and control the explosion of SaaS applications used in a decentralised way. The platform thus helps CIOs and other IT leaders to control this parallel IT/digitalisation and strengthen their employees' technological autonomy while preserving corporate governance.

The days of cumbersome and complex software suites being solely implemented and managed by IT departments are over. For years, SaaS has been exploding uncontrollably in large companies, creating underground digitalization.

In companies with more than 1,000 employees, there are on average several hundred different SaaS solutions in use, representing several million dollars in annual costs. According to a recent study by KPMG, the SaaS budget of companies is set to increase by 90% in the next 10 years, covering several thousand different solutions. A new IT paradigm is emerging.

However, this massive adoption of SaaS is largely outside of the IT department’s control, which leads to a considerable underestimation of the real volume of SaaS applications already used by the business lines. Consequently, these companies become highly vulnerable to the risks of cyber attacks: each uncontrolled SaaS application represents a potential security breach. Finally, SaaS budgets, representing an ever-increasing share of corporate IT, are largely under-optimized. Many SaaS solutions cover the same uses and are thus redundant, while others are underused or even completely unused.

The need to build a framework of technological autonomy for all professionals

There is a change in the way large enterprises procure, implement, use and manage SaaS software applications. It's more than just an IT phenomenon - the explosion of SaaS has introduced a real change in business organisation:

Accepting this trend means allowing employees who consider technology to be vital to the completion of their activities, to be engaged and become the primary actors in their IT landscapes.

For this, Beamy has developed powerful scoring algorithms capable of detecting all of the SaaS applications actually implemented in the company. Beamy is then able to follow the evolution of each application over time, provide employees with a catalog of all applications implemented in the company, define an autonomy matrix according to the potential risks of future applications, and navigate an app store of more than 50,000 applications on the market.

Beamy thus guarantees a global approach to SaaS governance necessary to support large companies in the long term to structure their IT decentralisation and establishing synergy between all stakeholders (CEOs, CIOs/other IT leaders, and business teams).

With an impressive end to 2021, this fundraising will allow the company to accelerate its international development (Beamy already being present in France and the United Kingdom on the international market), to create global leadership, and to strengthen customer relations by supporting them in their long-term governance efforts. 

To do this, Beamy plans to focus its investments on two major areas: recruitment, with plans to hire 40 more team members in the next twelve months, and product development, with the strengthening of detection technology and decentralisation workflows to further streamline collaboration between IT and business lines in the implementation and management of new SaaS solutions.