COMPANY

Name: Cledara

Legal Name: Cledara Limited 

Location: London, UK

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Cristina Vila Vives

Website: https://www.cledara.com/

Social Media: 293 followers on Twitter,  82 followers on Facebook,  332 followers on LinkedIn

Industry: Global Fintech Market

Size: $127.66B in 2018 (Source: Business Research Company)

Future: $309.98B by 2022 (Source: Business Research Company)

Introduction

Cledara offers a complete view of a company’s SaaS subscriptions. This software maps everything from what SaaS product was purchased, to who made the purchase, and what was the purchase intent, along with cost incurred – in real-time. 

It’s offering of a centralized platform and virtual debit cards empower dynamic teams in tech startups to easily buy, manage, and cancel SaaS subscriptions. It also streamlines recurring or one-off purchases. 

“We are different in that we are fully focused on helping tech companies with the purchase and the ongoing management of their subscriptions because everything is becoming a subscription and the way to manage one-off payments if very different to the way in which we manage recurring payments,” Founder and CEO of Cledara, Cristina Vila Vives said to TechCrunch.

By automating a lot of admin tasks, Cledara helps in delivering IT spend savings in the form of reclaimed VAT and removal of unused and duplicate subscriptions.

The Product

Cledara is a collaborative platform that offers tech startups actionable insights related to their software subscriptions. It’s a single source of truth that enables teams, sitting anywhere in the world, to track the SaaS or subscription-based products that the company uses. They even have virtual Mastercard debit cards, with spending limits, that allow employees to independently buy SaaS. 

The startup offers a request/approve/pay flow, where the management gets to approve every purchase before it happens. Cledara also can deliver real-time updates of what each user is purchasing, making it easier for company owners to manage IT budgets efficiently. Additionally, it automatically captures and uploads invoices to accounting systems.

Cledara’s bronze subscription package is available for free, for up to 30 users. The startup monetizes its solutions by charging a monthly subscription fee of £10 per user for the silver package, which can be extended to 500 users. Apart from this, interchange from merchants where Cledara Mastercards are used also attracts a small fee which adds to Cledara’s revenue stream.

Origin and Founding Team

When Cristina Vives was leading operations at London-based fintech company dopay, she noticed that they were unable to efficiently buy and manage SaaS application subscriptions, in a scalable manner. 

“Turns out, that that was a real challenge. We had offices in three different countries, remote developers, people working from home all signing up for different SaaS products and then expensing them back to the company. So I had to manually go around and ask everyone to fill in a spreadsheet to get the data, which was impossible because people only wrote those that they were actively using and could remember.” she told TechCrunch.

Since there wasn’t a clear record of subscriptions, dopay’s finance team found it difficult to justify regular payments for subscriptions.

So, this London School of Business and Finance alumni dug around trying to understand how other startups dealt with this problem. Soon, she realized that most tech companies used Google Sheets to keep track of their subscriptions. But that too wasn’t very error-free. With this clear insight, she started working on Cledara.

Vives went on to launch Cledara’s minimum viable product (MVP) in October 2019 at SaaStock, Europe’s largest SaaS conference. Here, she even won the Global Pitch Competition. 

Performance and Trends

According to an interview with Vives on SaaStock, Cledara has been doubling the amount transacted through the platform every month since January 2019. And the startup had set an initial goal of growing by 600% by the end of 2019, which it had already surpassed by August 2019. 

Cledara has raised a total of $930K in funding. And according to Pitchbook, an angel investor put in $90.9K in September 2018. Then, in April 2019, the startup received funds from the Techstars London accelerator program. 

Furthermore, in September 2019, it received $807k from a pre-seed round – led by Anthemis and joined by 2018 UKBAA Angel Investor of the Year, Chris Adelsbach. Cledara intends to utilize this capital to grow its product, engineering, and UX teams.

Cledara has been valued at $4M – $6M according to Dealroom.