SaaS Alerts’ solution is multi-tenanted, designed for MSPs, and costs far less than similar solutions provided by competitors like SOC as-a-service providers.
Wilmington, NC-based startup SaaS Alerts, which makes a SaaS monitoring and alerting solution specifically designed for the MSP market, has announced their second funding round, of $3 million dollars. While most of the funding round is coming from private investors tied to the security industry, a portion of it has been set aside for MSPs who want to invest in an MSP-focused offering in a high growth area.
Jim Lippie, CEO of SaaS Alerts
“There are a lot of SaaS monitoring solutions in the market for SMBs, some of which go direct,” said Jim Lippie, CEO of SaaS Alerts. “Ours is built specifically for the MSP, and is built multi-tenanted in order to facilitate the labour model associated with MSPs.” The solution unifies the monitoring and alerting of core business SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Dropbox and Slack and others. It centralizes security notifications and alerts, discovers abnormal user behavior and potential data loss/leakage risks, resolves gaps in management policies provides instant SaaS security assessments that can be used as a pre-sales tool.
“A lot of people, when they hear about what we do, associate us with SOC as-a- service or SIEM tools,” Lippie said “We are neither. We are purely software. We empower MSPs to capture more of the market. SOC as-a-service charges MSP between $4 and $12 bucks per user per month. We charge them 50 cents. This gives them protection at a point where they can make a very healthy margin.”
In the absence on an MSP-specific solution, Lippie said that some MSPs deal with the issue by going into the SaaS application tenant.
“The problem is that is very time consuming,” he said. “This makes it easy for them. We are like a robotic employee that scans and processes information they need to act.”
Lippie stressed that their solution is also easy for the MSP to use.
“We didn’t intend for this to be another pane of glass that the MSP stares at,” he said. “We have created integrations with PSA products, so the alerts arrive at the MSP in the form of a ticket.”
Lippie also indicated that their solution is now being used by over 200 MSPs, from the very small to the very large.
“Based on the adoption we have seen, it’s the full spectrum,” he said. “We have some 1-2 person MSPs, for whom the idea of a robotic employee is very beneficial. We also have some with thousands of employees and 50,000 end users. They use our API and webhooks to consume our application and route us into applications like ServiceNow. So our market runs from small guys to big guys, which is one of the things that really excites us about this model.”
This funding round follows up a smaller one late last year.
“In December, we went out to raise a $500,000 convertible note as seed money, and we were oversubscribed by $900,000, which came from industry veterans,” Lippie said. “We put it to good use, and have seen a lot of adoption and exponential growth on the platform.”
Two million of the new three million round is already spoken for, by former ConnectWise President David Bellini, who is now CEO of Password Boss and CFO at ConnectOn.
“The big news this is the allocation of $500k in investment room to MSP investors,” Lippie said. “The only party in the chain that doesn’t benefit from a sale of an MSP-focused company is the MSP. This space allows MSPs who believe in what we are doing to invest in this convertible note round, and we have teamed up with Channel Angels, which will handle this part of the investment.”
Lippie thinks that $10k will be the minimum for a single investment.
“The main objective here is to give MSPs opportunity to invest in an MSP-focused company and make some money down the road if things go as planned,” he said. “We wanted to give the MSPs an opportunity to invest in something for them. We also haven’t taken any venture money at this point.”
The new round will be spent on the traditional staples of early funding – more resources for sales, marketing and product development.
“So far we have been able to show a direct line between features and functionality and more adoption,” Lippie said.
“The marketplace today is in a state of transition,” Lippie concluded. “SaaS applications are here to stay and that’s only growing. Se want to provide the MSP community with a way to securely monitor and manage their customers as they transition off traditional on-prem, which the monitoring tools in the business were originally created for. We see SaaS security monitoring soon being as pervasive as antivirus is today – so the sky is the limit in terms of the total numbers of partners eventually. 20,000-30,000 partners sounds great to us.”
