Startup Deep Dive : Zluri — from forgotten subscriptions to a reported $107 million identity-governance bet

In FY22, the company behind what would become one of India’s better-funded identity-governance startups closed its books with operating income of just ₹5.83 lakh — against a net loss of ₹12.32 crore, according to financial filings reported by Entrackr. Eighteen months later, in July 2023, that same company, Zluri, raised $20 million from Lightspeed at a valuation trackers pegged near $107 million (about ₹1,030 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026), even though it still had no clear path to profit.

The gap between those two numbers is the story of Zluri: a Bengaluru-and-San-Francisco-based SaaS company (Inc42, July 2023) that started by helping IT teams find the subscriptions they had forgotten they were paying for, spent years fighting for space in a crowded “SaaS management” category, and then re-pointed the same technology at a much larger problem — knowing who has access to what, across every application in an enterprise. In 2025, Gartner gave that problem a name, Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms, that reads like a description of what Zluri had already built.

Quick facts

What they do

Zluri sells software that tells a company’s IT and security teams what SaaS applications their employees are actually using, who has access to each one, and whether that access still makes sense. The platform is built for mid-market and growing organisations — roughly 500 to 10,000 employees, per Zluri’s own positioning — that carry enterprise-scale compliance obligations without a large in-house identity team to police them. It began as a discovery and spend-optimisation tool that found shadow IT and duplicate subscriptions; it has since expanded into a fuller identity governance and administration suite covering access requests, periodic access reviews and segregation-of-duties checks, sold to IT, security and finance buyers on a subscription basis with no public price list.

The origin

The idea traces back to a personal irritation. Co-founder Sethu Meenakshisundaram found he was paying for fourteen software subscriptions he had signed up for and mostly forgotten, including an $80 Adobe Creative Cloud charge for a photo-editing hobby he had abandoned after a month, according to an account published on Zluri’s own blog. Curious whether this was just his own carelessness, he asked around and found a friend running a hundred-person company who was tracking roughly fifty SaaS subscriptions on a spreadsheet, with no reliable way to know what was still in use or who still needed it. Gartner’s research at the time put wasted SaaS spend at more than 30% of the total across a typical enterprise — a number that suggested the problem was structural, not personal.

Sethu took the idea to two people he had worked alongside for seven years at the corporate-learning company KNOLSKAPE: Ritish Reddy, and Chaithanya Yembari, who had been KNOLSKAPE’s director of engineering while Sethu ran business strategy and sales execution there. After talking to prospective enterprise buyers who confirmed they had the same blind spot, the three left to found Zluri in 2020, betting that no adequate tool yet existed to manage SaaS sprawl for mid-market and enterprise organisations.

The struggle years

The first real test of that bet showed up in the numbers, and it was not encouraging. For the financial year ended March 2022, Zluri Technologies Private Limited recorded operating income of just ₹5.83 lakh — effectively pre-revenue — while posting a net loss of ₹12.32 crore, according to filings reported by Entrackr. The company was, in effect, burning seed and early Series A capital with almost nothing yet coming back in in India-entity revenue terms, in a “SaaS management” category that was already occupied by better-capitalised American incumbents such as Zylo, BetterCloud and Torii, all named by Inc42 as direct competitors. Differentiating a discovery tool from half a dozen others chasing the same IT-operations budget line was, by the company’s own later positioning statements, a genuine struggle rather than a smooth land-grab.

The second struggle was strategic rather than financial: the category itself was too small and too commoditised to hold a venture-scale business. By 2024 and into 2025, Zluri had begun re-describing itself not as a SaaS spend-management tool but as an identity governance and administration platform, rebuilding its product narrative and roadmap around four modules — access management, access reviews, access requests and segregation-of-duties — a repositioning that only found external validation in 2025, when Gartner formally created a new market category, Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms, defined around exactly the visibility-first approach Zluri had been building since its earliest discovery engine.

The turning point

If there is a single hinge in Zluri’s timeline, it is the Series B round that closed in July 2023. Before it, the company was eighteen months removed from a Series A priced at a reported $37.5 million valuation (CB Insights, January 2022), still carrying the FY22 loss of ₹12.32 crore on next to no revenue, and still competing as one of a crowded field of “SaaSOps” vendors with no obvious way to stand apart. The $20 million round, led by Lightspeed with existing backers MassMutual Ventures, Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital returning, was reportedly struck at close to $107 million (ElectroIQ) — nearly three times the Series A mark in a year and a half — and it came with an explicit mandate from the company to fund generative-AI features (the Zluri CoPilot assistant) and international go-to-market expansion. On the other side of that capital, the trajectory changed shape: by FY24, revenue had reached ₹36.4 crore, and by FY25 it had climbed to ₹48.3 crore (Inc42) — a different order of scale from the FY22 starting point, even if the company was still deep in loss-making territory.

The money behind it

• Seed — $2 million, around January 2021: from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital, the capital that let the three founders leave KNOLSKAPE and build Zluri’s first discovery engine (Business Standard; YourStory).
• Series A — $10 million, 10 January 2022: led by MassMutual Ventures, with Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital returning; reported valuation of $37.5 million (CB Insights). Used, per the company’s own announcement, to expand into North America and Asia and to build out the product’s integration library, which by then covered 300-plus direct integrations and a 200,000-plus application catalogue.
• Series B — $20 million, July 2023: led by Lightspeed (partner Dev Khare joined the round), with MassMutual Ventures, Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital participating again; reported valuation of about $107 million (ElectroIQ), not officially confirmed by Zluri. Earmarked for generative-AI product work and go-to-market expansion in North America and Europe, where the company said more than 60% of its revenue already came from (Inc42, July 2023).
• Total raised to date: more than $32 million across the three priced rounds (Inc42; CB Insights). No further priced round had been publicly disclosed as of this writing.

How it makes money

Zluri is a conventional B2B software subscription business rather than a marketplace, so there is no take rate to speak of: it sells access to its platform, priced per the company’s own module structure, through a sales-led, demo-request motion with no public price list. The company has said more than 60% of its revenue comes from customers in Europe and North America (Inc42, July 2023), even though a meaningful part of its engineering organisation sits inside its India-registered subsidiary, Zluri Technologies Private Limited, based in Hyderabad (Tofler) — a structure common to India-origin, US-headquartered SaaS companies, where the US parent holds customer contracts and the Indian entity is compensated for services rendered to it. That structural split is also the likely reason separate, self-reported ARR figures given to the tracking site Latka — about $13.2 million in December 2023 and about $15 million in November 2024 — do not cleanly reconcile with the India entity’s RoC-filed revenue of ₹36.4 crore for FY24; they are almost certainly measuring different legal entities.

Where the margin actually sits is visible in the filings rather than in any published unit economics: FY25 net loss of ₹66.8 crore was larger than FY25 revenue of ₹48.3 crore (Inc42), meaning the company was still spending more than a rupee to generate one rupee of revenue. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating Zluri as a cost-tracking tool with a governance feature bolted on. In practice the discovery engine — the same integration and application-catalogue layer built to find forgotten subscriptions — is the technical moat behind the far larger identity-governance pitch; the “boring” spend-visibility product was never the end goal, it was the data pipeline for the business Zluri is now trying to build.

The numbers

Figures below are for Zluri Technologies Private Limited, the India-registered entity, as compiled by Inc42 from RoC filings, with an earlier data point from Entrackr’s FY22 coverage. Amounts are in ₹ crore. Zluri targeted roughly 5x revenue growth for FY23 at the time of its Series B announcement (Entrackr, July 2023), though no audited FY23 figure was found in public trackers.

Where the money comes from

• Geography: more than 60% of revenue came from Europe and North America as of July 2023, with the remainder spread across Asia-Pacific, including India (Inc42).
• Customer base: more than 250 organisations globally as of July 2023, per Zluri and Inc42, spanning mid-market and growth-stage technology companies.
• Named customers: Monday.com, Razorpay, Tipalti, Whoop, Catapult Sports, Traveloka, Smartnews, Amagi and Daxko are cited by Zluri and Inc42 as customers.
• Product-line split: the original SaaS discovery and spend-optimisation engine sits alongside a newer four-module identity governance and administration suite — access management, access reviews, access requests and segregation-of-duties — per Zluri’s own 2025 product materials.
• The surprise: the company’s own research (cited on its blog, referencing Gartner’s IAM 2025 summit) claims roughly 60% of SaaS applications in the average enterprise sit outside the reach of single sign-on and traditional identity systems — precisely the blind spot Zluri’s discovery layer is built to find, and the reason it argues visibility has to come before governance rather than the other way round.

The risks

• Crowded, well-capitalised competition: Inc42 names Zylo, Torii and BetterCloud as direct rivals in SaaS management, and Zluri’s pivot into identity governance also puts it in the path of established identity and access-management vendors with far deeper balance sheets.
• Continued cash burn: FY25’s net loss of ₹66.8 crore was larger than that year’s ₹48.3 crore in revenue (Inc42), implying the company was still burning more than it earned and would likely need further external capital before reaching profitability.
• Revenue concentration in Europe and North America: with more than 60% of revenue coming from those two regions (Inc42, 2023), Zluri’s growth is tied to enterprise IT-budget cycles and currency movements in markets where it competes against better-funded local incumbents rather than to its home Indian market.
• Custody of sensitive access data: a platform built to map every application and every identity’s access rights across a client’s SaaS estate is, by definition, holding some of its customers’ most sensitive security metadata; Zluri lists SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance on its own site as controls against this exposure, but the concentration of access-related data in one vendor remains a structural risk of the business model itself.

The takeaway

The lesson in Zluri’s arc is that the category a company starts in is not necessarily the category it wins in. The founders built a fairly narrow tool — find every SaaS subscription, flag the wasted ones — because that was the problem in front of them in 2020. It took years of thin financials and a crowded field of similar tools before the same underlying engine, redirected at a much larger question of who has access to what, found a market big enough to justify the capital already spent building it. Gartner did not tell Zluri what to build; it simply arrived, in 2025, at a name for something the company had already spent years constructing. The infrastructure came first. The category came after.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zluri do?

Zluri sells software that discovers every SaaS application an organisation uses, tracks spend and licence utilisation, and governs employee access to those applications through access reviews, access requests and segregation-of-duties checks, aimed mainly at mid-market and enterprise IT and security teams.

Who founded Zluri and when?

Zluri was founded in 2020 by Sethu Meenakshisundaram, Ritish Reddy and Chaithanya Yembari, former colleagues at the corporate-learning company KNOLSKAPE, after Sethu noticed he was paying for forgotten personal software subscriptions and found the same problem at enterprise scale.

How much funding has Zluri raised and from whom?

Zluri has raised more than $32 million across a $2 million seed round (Endiya Partners, Kalaari Capital, around January 2021), a $10 million Series A (led by MassMutual Ventures, January 2022) and a $20 million Series B (led by Lightspeed, July 2023), per Inc42 and CB Insights.

Is Zluri profitable?

No. Per Inc42’s compilation of its filings, Zluri Technologies Private Limited posted a net loss of ₹51.3 crore in FY24 and ₹66.8 crore in FY25, against revenue of ₹36.4 crore and ₹48.3 crore respectively, meaning losses were larger than revenue in both years.

What is Zluri’s valuation?

Zluri has not officially disclosed a valuation for its most recent round. Trackers, including ElectroIQ, put it at approximately $107 million (about ₹1,030 crore) around its July 2023 Series B, up from a reported $37.5 million at its January 2022 Series A, per CB Insights.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Lightspeed leads $20 Mn round in SaaS management startup Zluri”, July 2023
• Inc42 Datalabs, Zluri company financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “SaaS Management Startup Zluri Raises $20 Mn From Lightspeed, Existing Investors”, July 2023
• Inc42, Sethu Meenakshisundaram founder profile, accessed September 2026
• Zluri company blog, “The Story of Forgotten Subscriptions & the Birth of Zluri”, 2020
• Zluri company blog, “Lightspeed leads Zluri’s $20M funding round as SaaS management platform takes off”, July 2023
• Zluri company blog, “SaaS Management Platform Zluri raises $10M led by MassMutual Ventures”, January 2022
• Zluri company blog, “What the Gartner IAM 2025 Summit Revealed About the Future of Identity Governance”, 2025
• Zluri, “Our story” company page, accessed September 2026
• SecurityWeek, “Zluri Raises $20 Million for SaaS Management Platform”, July 2023
• CB Insights, Zluri financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Zluri Technologies Private Limited company profile, accessed September 2026
• ElectroIQ, “Zluri Statistics By Market Research, Revenue, Features, Funding, Insights And Facts”, accessed September 2026
• YourStory, “Zluri raises $20 million in Series B round led by Lightspeed”, July 2023
• Business Standard, “SaaS Management start-up Zluri secures USD 2M funding from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital”, January 2022

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