Xensam, a Swedish SaaS that provides AI-powered software asset management, has raised $40 million in growth funding from Expedition Growth Capital. Having been bootstrapped until now, it represents a significant investment that will be used to continue its AI product development while expanding its growing operations in the US and Europe.
A bootstrapped company that became a global leader
Founded by brothers Oskar and Gustav Fösker (now CEO and CTO respectively) the company has grown from just three staff members to one hundred since it was started in 2016. Xensam’s vision is to automate software asset management, ensuring that a company’s leadership can fully understand how what applications their staff are using, and how they use them. This enables them to use their digital infrastructure efficiently, delivering savings as well as empowering their users.
The platform is cloud-based, allowing it to be deployed in global organisations to manage their software portfolio, whether that software is SaaS or on-premises.
Oskar Fösker said Xensam is “an intuitive platform for software asset management and resource optimisation by leveraging AI and automation.” The value that it has provided to its customers has, he said, enabled Xensam to experience year-on-year growth of more than 126%.
Simplifying complex software environments
At its heart, Xensam solves the problem caused by the growing complexity of software. Even individual users will recognise the challenges of managing the mix of software purchases, licences, and subscriptions. For a large organisation, the problems grow exponentially, and can mean wasted money on unused licences and security problems with software that is not up-to-date or even installed unofficially.
Gustav Fösker highlighted the difference Xensam can make, “by pioneering AI from the start, we’ve transformed software asset management for hundreds of companies, making it user-friendly and removing manual work.”
The result is a big software asset management market, CEO Oskar Fösker told TFN, “The SAM market is estimated at $2 billion by Gartner. The actual problem that SAM tackles is enormous.” But the benefits are not just about saving on software costs. “The software budget is, of course, one part of it,” he said. “But failure with the software and SaaS portfolio is not only a financial risk, but also a security and legal risk. Unapproved software is one of the biggest security risks in any organisation.”
And Xensam has led the way in the growing software asset management market. Customers benefit from its perpetual agent that can identify and categorise hundreds of thousands of applications that might be used on corporate systems. It can then present the data to offer comprehensive oversight.
It also offers an integrated security centre that can monitor for compliance issues and security vulnerabilities, providing actionable intelligence to keep systems up-to-date and to take action against unauthorised installations.
And the AI-powered platform also democratises software asset management, providing easy-to-understand insights, so those outside IT departments don’t need to understand licensing systems that can often seem like a foreign language.
The growth that Xensam had seen before the investment was one of the key attractors for Expedition Growth Capital, said Oliver Thomas, its founder and managing partner. “Xensam is one of the most impressive European growth companies we’ve come across,” he said. “In the nearly eight years they have been operating, they have built a critical solution which is enabling companies with thousands of employees to track, monitor and manage software usage.” And that growth has produced an impressive client portfolio, including Volvo’s EV marque, Polestar, battery manufacturer Northvolt and F500 supply chain giant Jabil.
The new funding will help further develop their AI products, including chatbot interfaces for users, and support their continuing expansion, building on their current presences in the UK, US and across Europe. “This gives us the ability to speed up our growth in certain key areas,” Oskar Fösker told us. “This mainly means our sales entry into the US market and growing the tech department to enable new innovative projects.”
However, he adds that the changes will not alter the company’s upwards trajectory, “We will keep the same business principles of sustainable growth and core values that has always guided us.”
