Prodly Gets $10M for Salesforce Devops
Prodly, an independent software vendor based in Palo Alto, California, yesterday announced a $10 million Series A equity investment from a group of international investors. Moscow-based Leta Capital led the round, which also includes TMT Investments, AltaIR Capital, and Flyer One Ventures. Prodly aims to give the traditional Salesforce administrator a suite of no-code devops tools. “We don’t believe customers should have to choose between the business agility of citizen development on low-code applications and strong compliance controls that protect critical business systems,” said Max Rudman, CEO at Prodly in a press release.
Experienced CEO
Prodly comes to the investor market with a strong pedigree. Users of Salesforce CPQ may already be familiar with Mr. Rudman, who founded SteelBrick in 2005. That company was acquired by Salesforce in 2016, and the move led the way making Salesforce a better transactional platform. Mr. Rudman went on to helm the project at Salesforce until leaving to found Prodly in 2019.
No-Code Data Management
Prodly comes to the devops market with expertise on the exotic metadata found in advanced Salesforce applications. In many transactional systems, there are intricate data sets intertwined into user interfaces.
For example, systems like Salesforce CPQ lets users to create complex product configurations using the Salesforce user interface. The same situation occurs in B2B and B2C commerce applications. Sometimes the data that defines configuration options is encoded into project metadata. And configuration data may also be derived from data stored in Salesforce objects, or even externally.
Prodly helps users better manage that data with a Salesforce AppExchange managed package. The system organizes and manages data deployments to various Salesforce orgs used in release management. In addition to advanced data management capabilities, Prodly offers sandbox management features such as test data generation.
The Prodly user interface runs on top of Salesforce and uses a cloud native app in the background.
Prodly calls its family of products AppOps, and the data management features are part of AppOps Release. The other products in the AppOps suite include Build, Analyze, and Test.
Investment Pace is Steady
As an industry observer, I still see the Salesforce devops market as strong and dynamic. After speaking with several executives at many of the leading Salesforce devops companies, I can confirm they are all seeing strong growth and sales. Most companies have found a niche they are exploiting nicely. Growth seems to be limited by their ability to build up sales and customer care infrastructure, both of which require up-front capital investment.
This deal doesn’t fit the current pattern of an American or Silicon Valley Series A equity investment, given the international nature and the relatively low dollar amount. However, it makes sense that even a successful and profitable Salesforce devops company would see additional capital for expansion.
Prodly is the latest Salesforce devops equity investment news, and it is likely to not be the last. Salesforce devops-related investment, mergers, and acquisitions should continue at a strong pace for the remainder of 2021 and into the first half of 2022.
