This week, San Francisco startup Trace announced an $8M seed round led by Greylock and Uncork Capital with participation from Nyca Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and various individual angel investors. The company’s founders envisioned one collaborative platform for corporate finance teams via SaaS; and after launching in 2018, Trace successfully debuted their product in 2020. With their latest round, the company plans to grow their R&D team while continuing to expand services to companies between 200-1500 employees.
Why this transaction?
The York IE team chose this as our transaction of the week to highlight another use case, as SaaS adoption continues to expand across industries. For many CFO’s, financial planning and analysis remains a core function of their role; unfortunately, corporate finance teams often lack tools to perform the time-consuming and manual process of FP&A. With a collaborative SaaS platform, corporate finance teams can coordinate workflows and achieve financial targets while accelerating communication between decision-makers. This pandemic has been a watershed moment for automation, as many companies are realizing they must shift to the cloud and upgrade their tech stack in order to stay competitive. As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, SaaS technology’s scalable nature and low maintenance requirements make it a perfect fit for companies looking to upgrade their stack, pursue automation for workflows, and streamline collaboration among teams. With the help of SaaS platforms like Trace, companies and finance teams can avoid being reactive to changes and instead plan for multiple scenarios and adjust accordingly. As automation and digital adoption continue to lead growth strategies for many organizations, we see expanding opportunities for SaaS technology to address new challenges within core functions of business.
SaaS Across Industries, A Growing Trend
As we’ve mentioned in previous TOW blogs, SaaS adoption has expanded across industries like healthcare, financial services, marketing, and many others. When COVID-19 began, many companies were forced to vacate their on-premise solutions in favor of SaaS solutions that offered greater flexibility and user accessibility; although the pandemic was a major growth catalyst for SaaS, we expect to see these trends continue beyond the pandemic era.
