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Blissfully Announces $3.5 Million Investment to Power the Future of IT

August 9, 2018 in News

SaaS has matured dramatically over the last 5-10 years, to the point where teams are directly adopting the software they need to do their jobs without any oversight. The sheer number of high quality products solving all sorts of business needs has driven the fast rise of SaaS. In fact, our own data across 500+ customers shows this proliferation in SaaS is dominating across all business functions.

This explosion in SaaS adoption can introduce new challenges to business. These are important issues and questions that affect the entire organization, including:

Security & compliance: Is the new vendor that marketing chose SOC 2 compliant? Which vendors have access to sensitive information? Are our employes following basic account security best-practices?

Budgeting: Who’s reviewing the SaaS spending on a regular basis, now that it’s a significant line item in the P&L?

Vendor management: How do you evaluate and compare vendors, or manage the renewal process?
People operations and workflows: How do you make sure new employees have access to the apps they need to be productive? Or that former employees don’t have access?

In the past, the IT team typically addressed these challenges, but now the picture looks a lot more informal — chaotic, even.

In many cases, finance is left to discover unchecked spending issues, while engineering teams are on the front-lines of security and compliance challenges that can put the organization’s reputation and business on the line. Meanwhile, people ops teams are left with onboarding and offboarding employees onto the right technology. SaaS has made IT everyone’s job, but much of that job today is purely reactive. If organizations aren’t feeling the pain of SaaS chaos now, they will be soon.

Solving for SaaS chaos requires a collaborative effort, rather than a single person, team, or point solution. Organizations need to engage with IT and Security, Finance, HR, team leaders, executives, and more. We created Blissfully to give these teams real-time visibility into SaaS app usage and spending, serving a single source of record for SaaS management across the entire organization. Eric Paley at Founder Collective, whom Aaron White and I have had the pleasure of working with for two companies, likes to say that we’re “creating the operating system for IT teams of the future.”

Since launching out of private beta last fall, we’ve now worked with over 500 customers to solve pain points across their organizations. And we’re excited to keep building. To continue investing towards our vision of blissful SaaS management, we’re announcing a $3.5M seed round, led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (HWVP), and joined by HubSpot, Founder Collective, and a collection of great angel investors. Mitchell Kertzman, an experienced operator and General Partner at HMVP who led the round and is joining our board, said, “We think having the right platform to manage the proliferation of SaaS apps and vendors is the foundation for today’s modern IT, and we’re excited to back Blissfully to tackle that vision.”

This funding will accelerate our vision of powering a new model of IT management, purpose-built for the SaaS world – helping us make continued investments in our product, growth, and team.

HubSpot, a Blissfully investor and SaaS leader serving over 40,000 small and mid-market companies has seen the industry’s rocketship growth first-hand. CEO Brian Halligan added: “The widespread growth of SaaS across companies of all sizes is a leading indicator of the market need for Blissfully. We believe the Blissfully team can solve the problem of SaaS chaos, giving businesses critical insights into their application stack.”


SaaS has changed the way teams work for the better. Now, the approach to IT management has to evolve along with the way people work today. Blissfully’s ultimate goal is to give companies a new level of visibility, helping them get a handle on SaaS chaos and make smarter, more informed decisions.

You can learn more and sign up for free at Blissfully.com.

SaaS Spending to double by 2020. Will you be ready?

June 24, 2018 in SaaS Management, SaaS Trends

SaaS adoption has dramatically transformed the workplace. The apps we use have become one of the most personal parts of our jobs. This trend might have started with marketing teams pulling away from IT to make their own software decisions, but It turns out every team wants the freedom to choose the SaaS tools that work best for them. While SaaS has been growing at an insane rate over the last decade, our latest analysis predicts that SaaS growth is still a rocket ship.

As a SaaS management platform, Blissfully provides real-time visibility into SaaS app usage and spend across the entire organization. This gives us an incredible perspective on the impact of SaaS proliferation on organizations of all sizes and on a quarterly basis we analyze more than eight years of data across a sample of hundreds of companies of all sizes. In our latest report – Blissfully Q1 2018 SaaS Trends – we came away with three incredible key take-aways:
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Keeping SaaS Sprawl in Check: Three Key Questions to Ask

May 29, 2018 in SaaS Management

By: Ariel Diaz

The widespread use of SaaS software is a good thing for organizations. People feel empowered to buy and use the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. On the other hand, SaaS usage can quickly get out of control from a workflow, spend, visibility, and security perspective if left unchecked. If there’s no dedicated IT person in an organization, it can be tough to even know where to start.

No need to stress; we’ve pulled together the three key questions to ask yourself to keep SaaS sprawl in check. Hint: it’s all about the relationship between people and apps.
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The New IT: From Helpdesk to Business Operations

May 24, 2018 in SaaS Management, Security, Shadow IT

By: Matt Tharp

A recent study from Cisco showed that the average organization has 15 to 22 times more cloud applications running than have been authorized by the IT department. The question is, if everyone’s installing their own SaaS apps, who’s responsible for the role of IT at an organization? This question challenges every business, from startups to enterprises, and can serve as a major point of frustration for those assigned the role of IT management. Let’s take a look at why the problem of IT ownership exists, and how smart organizations should be handling it today.

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SOC 2 and Data Access Controls: What You Need to Know

March 29, 2018 in Compliance, SaaS Stack, Security


Guest post by Schuyler Brown, co-founder strongDM

As a part of our Blissfully SOC 2 compliance series, we invited strongDM to write a guest blog post about the challenges of data access controls, and why database management is important in the scheme of completing a SOC 2 audit. Blissfully used strongDM in our SOC 2 technology stack, mapped to the audit requirement of logical and physical access controls. Read more in our recently published SOC 2 Compliance Playbook.

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How to Build a People-Centric Employee Onboarding Process

January 25, 2018 in Employee Lifecycle, HR, SaaS Stack

Employee onboarding is one of the most important experiences in someone’s time at your organization. Onboarding is when they not only receive the tools they need to do the job they’ve been hired for, but also form their first impressions of what it’s like to work with you and begin acclimating to your organizational culture.

In fact, a strong employee onboarding program can increase retention by 25% and performance by 11%.

So while it’s easy to oversimplify employee onboarding as a technical process that involves things like email setup and benefits enrollment, it has much bigger implications from a culture and productivity standpoint. Therefore, it not only makes sense, but is imperative to your and your employees’ success to take a people-first approach as you bring new hires into the fold.

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