Highlights:

  • Companies can easily create a listing for a software product on the major public clouds’ marketplaces via a point-and-click wizard.
  • Tackle intends to support the software firms by taking their software products to the cloud marketplaces; it reduces the process from months to one and six weeks.
  • Tackle gives a dashboard to the software firms where they can see how much revenue is generated by their products, who has taken the subscription, and other granular details.

Tackle.io, an Idaho-based startup that helps software companies sell through cloud marketplaces, announced that it has raised USD 100 million in Series C funding. According to Tackle, its zero-engineering platform minimizes the time taken by software developers to list and sell their products on cloud marketplaces while allowing granular transaction reporting.

John Jahnke, the CEO of Tackle, said that many companies are now taking advantage of the increase in speed, convenience, and efficiency of software procurement via the cloud marketplaces on the back of pandemic-induced acceleration in cloud spending.

With Tackle’s cloud marketplace platform, technical teams can get started quickly as it requires little or no time or resources. Technical decision-makers, who would otherwise be responsible for building and maintaining their company’s marketplace listing, will now be able to handle the heavy lifting.

Companies can easily create a list of software products on the major public clouds’ marketplaces via a point-and-click wizard.

Tackle provides a tool that makes it easy to embed metering features into a software product. Metering allows software firms to sell their products under a usage-based pricing model similar to the one used by major public cloud operators. Customers can also use Tackle’s platform to implement other pricing models.

Furthermore, software makers can track how much revenue they are generating through various cloud marketplaces easily and quickly. With a dashboard, they can also monitor minute details such as how many users are using their software. Tackle helps companies track the percentage of people who sign up for a free software trial before they buy their subscription, detect cancellations and decipher what kind of cloud instances their customers are using.

Tackle’s platform supports various marketplaces such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Red Hat Marketplace. According to the company, more than 350 companies have signed up for its services to date. Some customers include PagerDuty Inc, HashiCorp Inc, and New Relic Inc, all of which are big names from the enterprise software market.

Tackle aims to utilize the new USD 100 million in funds to expand its presence on a global scale. The startup will improve on key areas such as product development to scale its growth plan. One of its agendas is to improve integrations with platforms such as Salesforce which is used by software companies to support their sales initiatives.

The increasing popularity of multi-cloud computing models in the enterprise cloud can contribute to the steady growth of Tackle in the long run. As more and more companies adopt the multi-cloud approach, it is more important that software firms start making their products available through as many marketplaces as possible.

Expert view

“With most software companies spending 50% of their revenue on acquiring and maintaining customers, there is a huge opportunity to streamline and optimize this experience to deliver more value to buyers and more efficiency for sellers,” Tackle Chief Executive Officer John Jahnke and Chief Technology Officer Dillon Woods said in a blog post.

Tackle’s goal is to “broaden our platform in support of startups looking to build a Marketplace-native go-to-market as well as enterprises that are retrofitting their product portfolios to align to the cloud buyer,” said Jahnke. “Tackle’s mission is to provide a global enterprise grade platform focused on bringing a Marketplace Cloud GTM to the masses.”