Productiv, which develops software that helps enterprises manage SaaS apps, raises $45M

Productiv, a platform for aggregating real-time engagement data and insights for apps and management, today announced that it raised $45 million in a series C funding round, bringing its total raised to date to over $73 million. The company says it’ll use the funding to bolster growth after a year in which Productiv more than doubled its headcount and added customers including DocuSign, Kayak, PagerDuty, and Robinhood.

Enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption has never been higher. Companies use 16 SaaS apps on average, driving the global industry to an estimated $157 billion. But coinciding with this climb is a decline in app usage transparency. A recent survey of IT leaders conducted by Numerify found that 45% don’t have a complete picture of key apps and business health services, with 57% saying they lacked an overview of IT performance across projects and employees.

The market’s relative opaqueness motivated Jody Shapiro, formerly head of product management for Google Analytics, to investigate a metrics-driven solution. Unable to find one, he developed his own in Palo Alto, California-based Productiv.

“When I was at Google, I witnessed first-hand how Google Analytics’ quantification of marketing efforts transformed the CMO role, but marveled that nothing like that existed for CIOs,” Shapiro told VentureBeat via email. “I got together with my two cofounders Ashish Aggarwal, former engineering lead at Postmates and Amazon, and Munish Gandhi, former COO for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to start Productiv.”

Productiv’s cloud-based dashboard integrates with single sign-on tools to track login activity and extract purchase and license data from contracts, finance, and expense reporting systems. The platform surfaces usage data and over 50 different engagement dimensions that can highlight redundant apps, offering an organization-wide view of agreements and expired software. Configurable rules enable admins to reclaim licenses automatically, and usage logs — including charts that plot the number of engaged users, teams, and locations over time — make it easier to compare stats to industry benchmarks and to determine best practices that might boost productivity.

“At the core of [the] platform is a complex, real-time analytics engine that automatically joins billions of data points from multiple sources, including user-level, feature-level engagement data from SaaS applications, login data from single sign-on providers, spend data from ERP providers, expense data from expense management providers, contract data from contract management providers, data from security providers, and more,” Shapiro explained. “Ingesting, normalizing, and joining all of this data is all automated.”

The endgame is to empower teams to make profit-boosting rightsizing decisions from app analytics. Rather than determining whether a division has, say, dozens or hundreds of Dropbox licenses and how many team members used those licenses in the past fiscal quarter, with Productiv, CIOs can drill down into the productivity impact and estimate the potential cost savings of choosing to cancel, upgrade, or downgrade service.

“Companies spend enormous amounts providing people with the tools they need to get their work done — more than $10,000 per employee annually — but these are open-loop investments without data to show how business value is delivered … Productiv gives CIOs actionable insights and intelligent recommendations, enabling them to focus on real, measurable business outcomes,” Shapiro continued. “Productiv helps enterprises understand exactly how their employees are using SaaS. Better usage and adoption data coupled with customizable automation of everyday tasks allow CIOs and their teams to focus on the projects that actually grow their business.”

Productiv, which has 75 employees, claims to have hundreds of enterprise customers.