Partnering with Clazar

The clout of cloud marketplaces

There’s a quiet revolution happening in B2B SaaS, and it’s all about cloud marketplaces. At present, billions of purchases are made through these platforms annually, giving vendors better levels of reach, faster sales cycles, and streamlined infrastructure. Buyers are drawn to cloud marketplaces because it simplifies procuring and onboarding new solutions. For sellers, cloud marketplaces offer access to over $340 billion in committed spend with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

But cloud marketplaces have a complexity problem. Managing a presence across multiple cloud marketplaces is tricky; it requires technical expertise and a significant resource investment to keep up with registration, listing, monitoring marketplace updates and building interconnectivity between cloud partner portals. 

Against this backdrop, we’re excited to share our investment in Clazar, a company that eliminates cloud GTM complexity by enabling software businesses of all sizes to list, manage, and co-sell on cloud marketplaces like AWS, Azure, and GCP with minimal engineering effort. 

Clazar automates the entire opportunity-to-cash lifecycle of a cloud marketplace deal—from product discovery through a public presence on the hyperscaler marketplaces to the sales ops and transaction orchestration that makes a deal happen. For software sellers, this means they can go live on cloud marketplaces in weeks instead of months, enable multi-product listings and co-selling across different marketplaces without any compounding costs, and improve data integrity between partner portals and CRM tools. 

TheGP’s view 

Our GTM Partner, Danny Oliveri, knew firsthand that selling through cloud marketplaces was a valuable new GTM channel. He also deeply understood where the incumbents fell short. Before we ever invested, he started supporting Clazar’s founders, Trunal Bhanse and Aayush Bahuguna, on their GTM strategy shortly after we were all introduced through Khawaja Shams, the founder of Momento (another GP portfolio company). 

From the outset, it was clear that Trunal and Aayush acutely understood the challenges of cloud marketplaces, and were the right team to modernize how software gets sold. Both Trunal and Aayush built full-lifecycle infrastructure products at Airbnb. Then later, Trunal was the Director of Engineering at Confluent, where he managed the 26-person team responsible for building and managing integrations into AWS, GCP, and Azure. They both clearly “got” the operational barriers vendors faced when using these platforms, as well as the conviction needed to build the right solution.

Now, less than a year in business, Clazar is already serving 100 paying customers. As cloud marketplaces are expected to drive $45 billion in third-party software sales by 2025, Clazar is well-positioned to help software vendors establish their presence on cloud marketplaces and capture the massive opportunity at hand. From leading Clazar’s seed round to helping them hire their Head of Sales (h/t Danny) to doubling down on their Series A, we’re excited to continue to work alongside Trunal, Aayush and their top-notch team as they continue to grow their customer base and transform the sales process for software companies going to market.