Salto Raises $27M to Configure SaaS with Code

Salto, an open-source startup headquartered in Tel Aviv, is officially launching today and announcing a $27 million Series A funding round. The company provides a method for configuring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms – including Salesforce, NetSuite, and HubSpot – using code. This funding round was spearheaded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Salesforce Ventures.

The core concept behind Salto mirrors the “infrastructure-as-code” approach, aiming to enable business operations teams to automate the often complex and potentially inaccurate processes they currently employ to manage SaaS platforms. While alternative solutions in this area focus on no-code management, Salto is taking a different path by prioritizing the use of code.

“We observed that the difficulties faced by BizOps teams closely resemble the challenges regularly encountered by software and DevOps engineers,” explains Salto co-founder and CEO Rami Tamir in a statement released today. “Therefore, we applied established software development principles and proven practices to the BizOps domain. There’s no need to create new solutions; the same techniques used for building high-quality software can also be used to maintain control over business applications.”

Image Credits: Salto

Salto offers the foundation of its service as open source. This open-source release includes the company’s NaCI language, a configuration language that uses a declarative approach and is based on the syntax of HashiCorp’s hcl, a command-line interface for implementing configuration updates (and retrieving the current configuration status of an application), and an extension for VS Code.

By integrating with Git, business operations teams can collaborate on developing these configurations and test them within staging environments. Essentially, the company is bringing contemporary software development practices to the realm of business operations.

Image Credits: Salto

“Expressing a company’s business logic as code has the potential to fundamentally alter how business applications are deployed,” writes Tamir. “We envision this as ‘company-as-code,’ analogous to how ‘infrastructure-as-code’ revolutionized data center management.”

Potential applications include configuring custom Salesforce CPQ fields, synchronizing profiles across various Salesforce environments, and managing audio logs for NetSuite. Currently, the company supports integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and NetSuite, with plans to add further connections in the near future.

Similar to other open-source businesses, Salto’s revenue model involves offering a hosted version of its service, which is also being introduced today.

The founding team’s prior success – having previously sold three companies they established – likely contributed to securing this new round of funding. Pentacom was acquired by Cisco earlier this year; Ravello Systems was acquired by Oracle in 2016, and Qumranet was acquired by Red Hat in 2008. The team includes Rami Tamir, Benny Schnaider, and Gil Hoffer.

“In today’s environment, business agility is paramount, and the alignment of external business services with actual business requirements is becoming increasingly strategically important,” stated Alex Kayyal, partner and head of International at Salesforce Ventures. “BizOps teams are playing a more and more vital role in company success. Salto empowers them to accomplish their objectives, providing them with modern methodologies and a significantly improved set of tools.”