Israeli start-up Salto emerged from mystery on Tuesday by launching its SaaS solution for business application configuration, announcing $27 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.
Series A funding is one of the stages in the capital-raising process by a start-up. Essentially, the series A round is the second stage of start-up financing and the first stage of venture capital financing.
Nowadays, modern companies are mostly relying on an increasing number of business applications and services to support their operations, using customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, HR and finance platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and NetSuite.
The success of the company is inherently linked to the maintaining of these business applications’ configurations aligned with the company’s rapidly evolving business needs, as difficult as it can be, timewise and work wise speaking.
That's why business operation teams, also known as BizOps, responsible for configuring and managing these services, need a robust toolbox, automated procedures and enhanced methodologies to help the company scale and prosper.
Veteran Israeli entrepreneurs Rami Tamir, Benny Schnaider and Gil Hoffer answered that need by creating Salto.
After their success with previous companies - Pentacom (acquired by Cisco), Qumranet (acquired by Red Hat) and Ravello Systems (acquired by Oracle), these two serial entrepreneurs founded Salto to fundamentally change the way companies configure and manage their business applications.
“We realized the challenges BizOps teams face are very similar to the problems encountered by software and DevOps engineers on a daily basis”, said Salto co-founder and CEO Rami Tamir.
“So we adapted software development fundamentals and best practices to the BizOps field. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; the same techniques used to make high-quality software can also be applied to keeping control over business applications”.
Salto, which has offered an open source project since early 2020 with an enterprise solution being released today, automatically extracts the configuration elements of different business applications such as fields, flows or processes, and translates them to a new declarative language called NaCl - “Not Another Configuration Language”.
Using NaCl with Git, a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development, the applications’ configurations can be collaboratively edited and deployed back to the live business apps, or to a staging environment for testing.
“Defining a company’s business logic as code can make a fundamental change in the way business applications are delivered”, said Tamir.
“We like to think about it as ‘company-as-code’, much in the same way as ‘infrastructure-as-code’ transformed the way we manage data centers.”
With Salto, the different configuration elements are searchable, and major changes can be properly planned, monitored and synchronized across the many business applications a company uses.
Configuration changes to multiple business applications can be easily tested, tracked or even rolled back if needed.While launching its richly-featured enterprise SaaS offering, an open source version of Salto is also available, staying true to the spirit of modern software development.“We envision an open ecosystem that doesn't lock users into using Salto alone. Similar to other open source software projects, we foresee a thriving community of members adding their own integrations, solutions and reusable code to share with the community”, said Tamir,
"Business agility is more important than ever today, and the alignment of external business services to real business needs is increasing in strategic importance”, said Alex Kayyal, Partner and Head of International at Salesforce Ventures.
“BizOps teams are becoming more and more crucial to the success of companies. With Salto, they are empowered to meet the tasks they are charged with, equipped with modernized methodologies and a greatly enhanced toolbox”.