Accelerating Cloud Marketplace Commerce
Our team at Intel Capital has invested in software for over three decades. While technology continues to evolve, one thing remains true and in full force – momentum around IT’s shift towards a cloud-first culture. Within our own portfolio and across businesses large and small, we’ve witnessed this accelerated migration to the cloud. In effect, we’ve seen firsthand demand for a first and third-party software that both enables and supports cloud-first operations.
We have seen an accelerated adoption of cloud marketplace buying and selling, however, the software purchasing process still remains laden with barriers. Having a marketplace strategy intact provides countless benefits to businesses, such as co-sell opportunities and unlocking buyer budgets.
The five largest cloud marketplaces today are GCP, AWS, Azure, Red Hat and Alibaba. Others include IBM, Snowflake, Oracle, Salesforce, and many more. Each marketplace has unique APIs, pricing models, and requirements, leading to bespoke integrations and ongoing maintenance.
Getting setup on marketplaces has historically been difficult and a point of friction. Solutions that exist today are heavily services, can take months to set up, and are not end-to-end. Enter Suger, a sales platform that manages the full lifecycle of cloud marketplaces, spanning product listings, offers, contracts, metering, billing, and CRM integration. Suger is an API-First, enterprise-integrated software solution for the cloud marketplace that helps software companies accelerate cloud revenue and streamline sales and operational workflows.
With businesses building out their cloud marketplace strategies, and as marketplaces are more embedded in software sales, procurement, and fulfillment, there is the opportunity to build a true workflow tool – a marketplace abstraction layer in this category.
Meeting and spending time with co-founders Jon Yoo and Chengjun Yuan was the kicker for our team. It felt as if we had known each other long before we decided to partner together. Jon previously held leadership positions at Workstream and Salesforce. Chengjun led monetization of cloud marketplaces at Confluent, with deep technical experience at Google and Meta. Their large vision for the product was clear, their pulse on the market was spot-on, and passion to solve this problem was infectious. We are thrilled to announce co-leading Suger’s seed round alongside Craft Ventures, and existing investors including Y Combinator. We are grateful to be included on this journey with this team.
