Salto, a startup developing an automation solution for enterprise app configuration, today emerged from stealth with $27 million in funding. CEO Rami Tamir says the funds will be put toward bolstering Salto’s go-to-market and product R&D efforts and expanding its 30-person team.
Businesses rely on an increasing number of apps and services to support their operations, from customer relationship management and marketing solutions to HR and finance platforms. According to one source, businesses now use an average of 34 software-as-a-service apps. And they expect that 83% of company work will be done from the cloud by 2021.
The process of aligning a business’ app configurations with their needs can be inefficient, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to error. Salto automatically extracts the configuration elements of different business apps (like fields, flows, and processes) and translates them to a declarative language called Not Another Configuration Language (NaCl). Using NaCl with Git, a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code, apps’ configurations can be collaboratively edited and deployed back to live business apps or to staging environments for testing.
Tamir founded Salto with Benny Schnaider and Gil Hoffer after their success with previous companies, including Pentacom (which Cisco acquired in 2000 for $118 million), Qumranet (acquired by Red Hat in 2008 for $107 million), and Ravello Systems (acquired by Oracle in 2016 for a reported $500 million). With Salto, the cofounders sought to build an open source project that could make different app configuration elements searchable, as well as monitoring, synchronizing, testing, tracking, and rolling back changes across apps from Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and NetSuite.
Salto comprises NaCI and the Salto command line interface, a tool that uses NaCl files to manage the configuration of business apps with operations like Deploy (which deploys configuration changes to a business app) and Fetch (which fetches the latest state of a business app into NaCl files). The command line consists of a core processing engine and various adapters to interact with the different business apps, as well as an extension to the popular VS-Code IDE that interacts with NaCI files.
An enterprise version of Salto is launching today, following a pilot with 10 to 20 users, but the open source version will remain available, Tamir says. “The ability of companies to move quickly is critical in today’s business environment,” he said. “But doing so requires a holistic approach, one that enables applying your business logic across business applications quickly, easily, and accurately. We felt that while the market opportunity was massive, there was no solution out there that offered that. So we decided to build one ourselves.”
Bessemer Venture Partners led Salto’s series A round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.
