SAN FRANCISCO — Clazar, a company powering software businesses to sell and grow revenue through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, and GCP), 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.
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.
