SaaS management platform provider Zylo won the Scale-up of the Year – Tech Product award during TechPoint’s 21st annual Mira Awards gala honoring the best of tech in Indiana.

WATCH VIDEO: Gerry Dick interviews Zylo Co-founder and CEO Eric Christopher.
WATCH VIDEO: Zylo accepts Scale-up of the Year – Tech Product Mira Award.

In 2016, Gartner estimated the SaaS market to be worth $37 billion. In 2019, it had ballooned to $100 billion. And in 2020, it’s expected to surpass $116 billion. This hyper-growth has been created by new software that’s more convenient, connected, and effective. But SaaS growth creates concern for CEOs, CIOs, and IT leaders. One in three employees now purchase SaaS applications and often do so without IT knowledge or approval. Often, all that’s needed is a credit card and an Internet connection. The growing adoption of SaaS introduces risks to budgeting, security, and compliance.

To answer this challenge, in 2016, software industry veterans Eric Christopher, Ben Pippenger, Cory Wheeler, and Ryan Carroll launched Zylo from the High Alpha venture studio. The new company’s goal was to address the complexity, risk, and difficulty managing SaaS-heavy technology environments.

Today, Zylo remains an elegant solution to taming the chaos of SaaS adoption. Zylo utilizes machine-learning algorithms to analyze customer financial data and identify SaaS applications at near 100-percent accuracy. This analysis then streams into a system of record, creating an actionable central dashboard to monitor, measure, and optimize every SaaS instance within a company.

Zylo celebrates the moment the company is named Scale-up of the year – Tech Product.
Zylo Co-founder and CEO Eric Christopher (and special helper).

The Mira Awards judges believe that Zylo stands as an exceptional example of not only the creative problem-solving and innovation coming out of Indianapolis, but the company’s ability to attract venture capital to fuel its rapid growth (over three years) has put Zylo on the path towards a $1 billion evaluation.

Prior to Zylo, no product existed to solve the complex problem of SaaS adoption chaos. Companies were forced to manually collect spend information and SaaS application data from multiple sources, frequently employing outdated software asset management processes designed for on-premises server-based software that did not account for SaaS. Now, Zylo users can track every payment for software subscriptions and bolster that with utilization data and line-item contract information (such as renewal dates) to provide hands-on management of SaaS and its cost.

Zylo’s SaaS management solution powers innovative companies across the world including Adobe, Atlassian, Bird, Nike, Lilly, Salesforce, Zendesk, Verizon, Spotify, Slack, Twitter, and Uber. Zylo has analyzed more than $192B in spending data on behalf of its clients, identifying more than 42,000 SaaS applications. Today, Zylo enables customers to manage more than $12 billion in active spending.

Zylo’s success has allowed it to scale from four co-founders and an engineer to a team of 75 professionals. Headcount and revenue have grown significantly every year, with revenue growth reaching as high as 300% each year and staffing following a strong growth trajectory.

To date, Zylo has raised $34.5 million in funding. Its 2016 seed round led by High Alpha raised $3.3 million. In 2017, its Series A round raised $9.3 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by High Alpha, Salesforce Ventures, the Slack Fund, and Rise of the Rest. And finally, a Series B in 2019 raised more than $22.5 million led by Menlo Ventures and joined by multiple repeat investors from previous rounds.

TechPoint, the nonprofit, industry-led growth accelerator for Indiana’s tech ecosystem, honored the successes and innovation of Indiana people, places, companies and products during the 21st annual and first-ever virtual Mira Awards gala with presenting sponsors Eli Lilly and Company, Genesys, Infosys, Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Salesforce.

WATCH RECORDING OF EVENT BROADCAST

A total of 15 award winners and honorees were chosen from the 129 outstanding people, places companies and products that were selected as nominees for their achievements during the 2019 calendar year. Forty-eight independent, volunteer judges spent more than 850 total hours evaluating applications, interviewing nominees, and selecting this year’s winners. Judges included company founders, CEOs and presidents, CTOs, CIOs, and other subject matter experts.

SEE ALL 2020 MIRA AWARD WINNERS

The Mira Awards are named after the first of the brilliant variable stars to be discovered – the Mira Star. It is also the Latin root meaning “worthy of admiration, wonderful, marvelous.” The awards represent the best of tech in Indiana each year.