Unaric raises $35m seed round to empower Salesforce software builders to unlock their full potential

Unaric – building the world’s leading Salesforce product suite by buying, scaling and consolidating Salesforce focused Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) – has raised $35m in a debt and equity seed round from LocalGlobe, Concentric, FJ labs and Atempo Growth. Leading angel investors from the ecosystem, such as OwnBackup founder Sam Gutmann, SaaS Guru Dave Kellogg and Hotjar founder Johan Malmberg.

As the largest SaaS ecosystem in the world, more than 4,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) supply software products connected to Salesforce, worth $29bn a year in 2021, predicted to grow to $68bn in 2026. These vendors offer point solutions but often find it difficult to scale, despite having strong technical products, due to the unique nature of their business models within this ecosystem. It takes a specific set of skills, knowledge and experience of the Salesforce ecosystem to unlock this potential – all of which Unaric’s founders and management team have gained from a combined 40 years founding, building, running and merging companies in the Salesforce sector.

Unlocking value for all

Unaric is aiming to acquire 30-40 companies in the next three years. The first, in what is likely to be a string of deals, is announced today with London-based Salesforce module Bolt, a company with over 1000 customers, joining the Unaric family.

Unaric’s exceptional founder and scaling experience can help consolidated companies increase sales by at least 10X through cross-selling opportunities, knowledge-sharing and a shared central infrastructure including a common product and engineering hub to support organic investment opportunities. With this enterprise-centric approach, Unaric will unlock significant value for enterprises leveraging the Salesforce ecosystem.

It’s a consolidation approach that has already seen success in vertical markets – most notably with Veeva Systems ($31bn market cap), Ncino ($3bn market cap) and also with horizontal consolidators such as Constellation Software, a $43bn market capital company. Unaric will apply a similar approach, with a strong focus on central services to drive value across products.

Salesforce ecosystem

To put the scale and scope of the opportunity into perspective, Salesforce is the largest SaaS business in the world. It owns a quarter of the CRM market and has had an average growth of more than 25% a year the last 10 years. Around 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Salesforce. The independent software vendor ecosystem nurtured by Salesforce is a critical revenue and growth driver for the business, growing economic activity on its platform, encouraging outsourced innovation and supporting customer lock-in as enterprise clients partner with these businesses to tailor their own Salesforce experiences.

Yet despite this huge potential, research by Unaric has found that 62% of Saas companies built on the Salesforce ecosystem have an ARR of less than $5m and remain under-invested, often failing to realize their potential. This also reduces their exit options significantly. At the same time, almost three quarters of Salesforce companies are bootstrapped meaning they face challenges around access to growth capital, retaining talent and expanding their enterprise customer bases. Since larger companies can be unwilling to buy products from multiple smaller providers, they often forgo a superior product simply because it is offered by a startup compan

By founders, for founders

James Gasteen, Co-founder & CEO, started Unaric after his experience founding and merging his own salesforce business, Precursive, in 2019 with an adjacent Salesforce company that had a complementary product. The merged business was able to unlock greater value for customers and went onto raise growth capital from investors.

A chance meeting with chairman Peter Lindholm, turned into a combined epiphany about the potential of Unaric and he began working with the former co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based Frontier Car Group, who turned FCG into a unicorn via the sale of the business to leading emerging markets investor Prosus. FCG was an active acquirer of smaller businesses itself, as it built a global business through a blend of consolidation and internal product development.

Unaric CPO Neil Crawford is a second-time founder who co-founded Salesforce platform based Distribution Engine, which was bootstrapped to a team of 20 serving over 350 enterprise customers worldwide before being sold. Neil leads Unaric's central services team which drives engineering, product and growth initiatives across Unaric's portfolio of companies, supporting the development of a best-in-class product suite and coordinated approach around go-to-market and customer success across enterprise clients. Unaric sees focused applications of AI across its portfolio as a significant lever as it brings investment to often bootstrapped founder-owned businesses. Neil is supported by Head of Architecture, James Melville, who was previously a Salesforce architect at Accenture, SalesTrip and Aforza.

Meanwhile, Moritz Birke, Unaric’s CFO, was formerly an investment banker at Macquarie where he worked on $50bn+ worth of transactions involving founder-owned businesses in US and Europe.

Unaric was started by founders for founders to help them release the value they have created. There is a mismatch in the Salesforce ISV ecosystem which we have experienced personally and we know how to put it right. We believe that by building suites of products that match more closely the needs of enterprises, we can help companies to significantly increase their sales, scale their businesses and sell to corporate buyers who would not normally buy from individual vendors. When software businesses become part of Unaric we can take all the admin off the founders’ plate and accelerate their growth channels, so that they can carry on building a great technical product.

James Gasteen, Co-founder & CEO of Unaric

Peter Lindholm, Co-founder & Chair, said: “We’ve put together a team of people who understand what it takes to scale a software company and there is a strong opportunity for consolidation in this sector right now. Our mission is to help founders of ISVs take the next step – whether they intend to stay with the business they founded or whether they are looking for an exit. Unaric will build industry-focused suites of companies that innovate on product, drive scale and increase revenues.”

Other notable private investors joining the round include Daniel Waterhouse, General Partner at Balderton Capital; Sujay Tyle, co-founder of unicorns Frontier Car Group & Merama; Philipp Triebel, co-founder Sellerx; Patrick Aisher serial SaaS entrepreneur & founder of Mountain Labs and German football Star Mario Gotze.