London, April 19, 2022 – Beamy, a European pioneer in SaaS management for large companies, has raised more than 8 million euros in Series A funding. This funding round was led by the Aglaé Ventures, ISAI funds and Evolem as well as business angels Nicolas Hernandez (360 Learning) and Erwan Keraudy (CybelAngel). 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 Parisian scale-up featured in “Future 40” of Station F, offers companies a unique solution that can detect and control the explosion of SaaS applications within their business. The platform thus helps CIOs and other IT leaders control this parallel IT/digitalisation and to strengthen the technological autonomy of the employees while preserving corporate governance.
Becoming aware of the explosion of SaaS in business is vital
The days of cumbersome and complex software suites being implemented and managed by IT departments alone are over. For years, SaaS has been exploding uncontrollably in large companies, creating underground digitalisation.
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 will 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-optimised. Many SaaS solutions cover the same uses and are thus redundant, while others are underused or even completely unused.
“In general, when we meet a CIO of a large company, they estimate that their organisation uses 30 to 40 SaaS tools. However, when we begin working together, our technology detects several hundred active SaaS solutions, often revealing more than 75% of shadow IT,” explains Beamy CEO and co-founder Andréa Jacquemin.
The need to build a framework of technological autonomy for the all professionals
There is a change in the way large enterprises procure, implement, use and manage SaaS software applications. More than an IT phenomenon, the explosion of SaaS has introduced a real change within businesses in business organisation: “the top down vision of IT is over. We are witnessing a true decentralisation of technological ownership and empowerment of business units, which are selecting and implementing their own solution,” explains Jacquemin.
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. “The decentralisation framework must be compatible with the technological autonomy granted. This is a story of balance. If we put too many constraints on employees’ ability to choose their applications and implement lengthy processes, they will still use the applications but won’t go through the proper channels with IT in the implementation,” explained Jacquemin. “Without a solid structure of decentralisation, the risks will be considerably increased and the budgets won’t be optimized. In any situation, you have to find the proper balance in terms of autonomy that works for your workforce, but keeping the status quo on this subject is the worst solution.”
For this, Beamy has developed powerful scoring algorithms capable of detecting all of the SaaS applications actually implemented in the company. Beamy then is 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 establish synergy between all stakeholders (CEOs, CIOs/other IT leaders, and business teams).
Beamy wants to accelerate its international expansion
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 strengthen customer relations by supporting them in their long-term governance efforts. “We are convinced that SaaS issues are major issues for large companies, whether French or international. With this fundraising from major investors including Agaé Ventures and Isai, both of whom are recognised for offering cutting edge expertise in the tech sector, we are setting out to conquer the international market,” explains Jacquemin.
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; 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.
“As investors, we are familiar with the SaaS model and the benefits that users and business departments can derive from it. For large companies, mastering this deployment, which is often in the ‘shadows’, represents a real challenge,” said Jean-David Chambordeon of Isaï. “The vision of Beamy’s founders to identify, rationalise, unify, and allow the security of this B2B SaaS stack within organisations quickly convinced us. The excellent customer feedback we have been able to collect shows that Beamy is in the process of becoming the reference platform in this field.”
“Beamy provides an exhaustive view of SaaS tools and provides a governance platform with a real return on investment,” said Léa Verdillon of Aglaé Ventures. “The great feedback we’ve heard from customers convinced us that Andréa and Edouard formed the right team to develop Beamy. The international ambition that drives them is in perfect harmony with the fast-growing market, particularly in the United States, which is one of our areas of investment.”