Clazar raises $10M to revolutionize the way software is bought and sold

Ensemble is proud to announce our most recent investment in Clazar, a company powering software businesses to sell and grow revenue through cloud marketplaces, like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Ensemble led the $10 million Series A alongside Ridge Ventures, with participation from The GP and others.

Clazar was founded in 2023 by Trunal Bhanse and Aayush Bahuguna. Trunal and Aayush bring a wealth of experience from their previous roles at high-profile companies such as Confluent, Airbnb, Facebook, Zenefits, and LinkedIn. In fact, Clazar was formed to work on the very same GTM problem that Trunal had worked on—with the help of a 100-person? team—in his prior role at Confluent. With cloud marketplaces expected to drive $45 billion in third-party software sales by 2025, Clazar ensures that all software businesses, from startups to enterprises, can automate all components of their cloud sales and grow revenue through a faster, more cost-efficient route to market.?

The results so far have been incredible, and it’s no accident. In less than a year, Clazar is already serving about 100 paying customers, underscoring the high demand for its comprehensive GTM automation solution for cloud marketplaces. Clazar also represents the reunion of former Airbnb teammates who were highly successful in their time together. Both had gone on to start and lead successful teams at other high-growth companies.?

At Ensemble we say that great teams drive great outcomes, which is why we were so drawn to Clazar. After sitting down for an interview with Trunal and Aayush, we came away with a new saying: great teams don’t happen by accident. We knew that Clazar was a well-oiled machine, but we learned just how thoughtful its founders are in structuring their product and culture, drawing on successes and learnings from the engine rooms of tech’s most impactful companies.?

Execution from the very start

We understood very quickly after our first meeting with Trunal and Aayush that their approach to execution was inspired, if not intense. Over the course of 2023, we watched them go from incorporating the company to product launch to one hundred customers –a pretty astounding achievement. But for all the progress, the Clazar team never showed signs that their success was anything but standard procedure. In our interview, we learned that’s because Trunal and Aayush had, from the very first day, been implementing a culture solely focused on customer love and the quality of their interactions with Clazar’s product.?

“Way back when we were even thinking about what to name the company, we actually made a list of products that we absolutely love,” Trunal told us. “Products like 1Password, products like Slack. “We wanted to reproduce those ‘love’ moments with our product.”

Aayush even joked that the founders were so focused on developing a “lovable” product that they weren’t sure how to occupy themselves when away from early Clazar work: “When we are not working on Clazar for a few hours, we get bored. You definitely need to sleep and need time to exercise. But for us both personally, it's hard to stay away.”

“We realized that Monday to Friday is a lot of day-to-day execution,” he said. “I do the technical product, and it was very hard to step back and have that space to think about how things are going. So we spent time on Saturdays and Sundays. During the initial growth phase, every Sunday, we used to spend hours talking about, ‘What are the things stopping our growth today, and how can we make it better?’”

Drawing on pivotal career experiences at industry leaders

It should come as no surprise that Clazar’s founders took the company’s early days in stride. Both of them have made careers of staying out of their comfort zones, repeatedly seeking out opportunities within large and growing tech companies to launch new teams working on novel problems.?

Under the umbrellas of the world’s tech giants, these teams grew to resemble standalone businesses themselves, with dozens of employees developing industry-leading solutions for problems that are specific and complex but also common to a wide range of companies. These teams develop highly specialized products with massive potential markets. In that sense, Trunal had been a founder for years, and had adopted the mindset of an early-stage leader.

“At LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Confluent, I gravitated towards the founders and the initial group of early people who go at it from a really mission-driven approach,” he said. “For me, the mission is solving something that is changing the world, and being able to bring something to the world that is meaningful and differentiated.”

Aayush shared a pattern of finding new problems within blue-chip firms: “I started my career at Facebook when we were hitting one billion daily active users. So, really fun times… But there was always a focus on building things from scratch, seeing that value grow, and providing that value to the people.”

Clazar combines the best of all worlds?

When it came time to found Clazar, they could draw on those previous leadership experiences while integrating the best practices of their former employers in terms of company culture.

“Each of these organizations has given me a lot of learnings,” Trunal told us. “At Airbnb, I learned the value of having a good culture and hiring really smart, good people. I believe Airbnb is successful because that is such a core of its DNA.”

Aayush added, “I've learned in the last decade that every company is unique. At Facebook I was learning about doing things at scale. At Zenefits, I personally learned how to build SaaS products zero-to-one, and then from one-to-ten, I learned the importance of talking to customers, learning about their pain points, and feeding it into the product.”?

“And if you look at the current core values of [Clazar],” he said, “all of it is inspiration from all the places we have worked in the past.”

Reunion and Clazar

Trunal saw an opportunity to reunite with Aayush while he was leading a team of over 100 engineers working on the singular problem of getting Confluent’s own software onto cloud marketplaces.?

When Trunal told Aayush about Confluent’s GTM project, Aayush was shocked that at a top company, the singular issue of cloud marketplace GTM – which in today’s environment affects almost every enterprise software company – required a hundred-person engineering team.?

“We talked to about 30 different software industry leaders. Everybody faced similar challenges. And there was nobody out there in the industry that we felt was doing the justice for solving people's pain points.” So they struck out on their own.

“We haven’t just built one product. What we've built is the ability to learn from the market and quickly react to the way the market is changing because that is the only way to be successful. The only thing that you can control is your ability to react and then bring products and changes in your ecosystem that are mapped to what you're seeing out there.”

“Ensemble looks more like a software company than a VC firm.”?

That was the feedback we received from Trunal and Aayush after we shared a preview of some of our unique data capabilities with the Clazar team, particularly Ensemble’s GTM Product to streamline and extend Clazar’s sales efforts. Our GTM product is a prime example of our ability to offer tangible benefits to portfolio companies—not just promises.?

Ensemble’s GTM Product identifies and prioritizes net new customer leads to optimize the sales team’s time and effort, all through the same capabilities that we use internally to identify top teams like Clazar. We believe software, which is infinitely scalable, can be much more effective (than traditional models) in supporting Clazar and other resource-constrained startups. And even experienced founders want help with new customers.?

It was this demonstration of adding value that ultimately earned Ensemble the opportunity to partner with Trunal and Aayush, two talented leaders who had their pick of investors.?

Trunal said, “When we are working with you guys – the quality of the questions you ask, the quality of data you brought forth, the quality of interactions – make us feel a lot more comfortable about this being an equal partnership where everyone brings something to the table.”

At Ensemble, we are excited and fortunate to partner with Trunal, Aayush, and the rest of the Clazar team. For any SaaS company large or small, cloud marketplaces are a critical sales channel that could be a bigger revenue channel than traditional B2B sales. For that reason we believe Clazar should be everyone’s cloud marketplace co-pilot.

Stay tuned as we share more about Ensemble’s GTM product in a future newsletter!