To ease the burden of maintaining their IT infrastructure, many companies, especially SMBs, turn to third-party IT providers. Called managed service providers (MSPs), they make life easier for their clients, but deal with many problems of their own, including fragmented tech tools that result in complicated workflows that cut into time spent serving customers and even eat into their profitability.
SuperOps.ai says its cloud-native, unified platform is capable of streamlining IT management to the point of replacing eight separate tools. Based in Santa Monica, the startup announced today it has raised $12.4 million in Series B funding, led by Addition and March Capital, with participation from Matrix Partners. The capital will be used for research and development, including adding more AI capabilities to SuperOps.ai’s platform, like a predictive intelligence layer that will help MSPs pre-empt client issues and save time.
The new funding brings SuperOps.ai’s total raised since it was founded in 2020 to $29.4 million. Over the last 12 months, the company claims it has clocked 300% customer growth.
SuperOps.ai founders Arvind Parthiban and Jay Karumbasalam. Image Credits: SuperOps.ai
SuperOps.ai co-founders Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam have spent more than 20 years building tech products. At the beginning, they focused on software for MSPs. Fast-forward two decades later, and the two were once again looking at the tech-for-MSP space when they “realized while technology as a whole had leaped forward, the tech-for-MSP space had remained stagnant,” Parthiban tells TechCrunch. “Most of the tools were built for the on-premise era, and are still unwieldy, too bloated and difficult to manage. Many of the incumbent legacy players also acquired adjacent tools and stitched them together and that has resulted in solutions that are not efficient or easy to use.”
MSPs need multiple tools to serve their clients, including Professional Services Automation (PSA) for service desk and ticketing, invoicing, quoting and contract management. They also need Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools to remotely monitor client devices so they can fix issues. On top of this, MSPs also need IT documentation, project management and network monitoring. This can make it hard for MSPs to do their jobs because their collection of tools often do not communicate with one another, meaning they have to switch tabs and context while resolving issues, adding a layer of time-sucking friction.
Parthiban and Karumbasalam saw an opportunity to reduce headaches for MSPs and help them work more efficiently by creating a unified platform. Developed after conversations with 450 MSPs, SuperOps.ai is an automation-led unified PSA-RMM with built-in IT documentation, project management and a recently launched networking monitoring feature.
Parthiban said SuperOps.ai’s platform can replace about eight separate tools, and has AI capabilities that removes false alerts. As SuperOps.ai’s AI develops, it will further automate tasks, predict issues and eventually solve many of them, he added. Since all of the data and information MSPs need to operate and support clients is in one platform, SuperOps.ai allows them to do things like move straight to the asset that needs to be fixed from within a ticket.
SuperOps.ai’s tool for managing workloads better. Image Credits: SuperOps.ai
SuperOps.ai serves many different types of MSPs and IT teams, but they are typically growth-focused businesses that want to improve their revenue and profitability. This includes smaller MSPs that have teams of fewer than five, or more mature providers that have offices in multiple cities. “Some of them are break-fix shops, while others offer clients extensive IT infrastructure monitoring and management support. Most of the businesses we serve are SMBs, who have been traditionally underserved by technology providers,” says Parthiban.
An example of how a client used SuperOps.ai to improve its business is Selectgroup, a 33-year-old MSP based in the United Kingdom that wanted to stop relying on legacy tools like Datto and Syncro. Selectgroup director Matthew Fenton signed onto SuperOps.ai’s beta stage after it launched remote desktop control. Shortly after, Fenton had to connect to six computers to make a change in settings. Before SuperOps.ai, he says he would have had to spend hours connecting to the customer server, then from the server use the DNC to the local computer. Most of the process would have been spent on the phone, leaving little time to work on other things or help customers. With SuperOps.ai, however, Fenton was able to connect to six computers remotely, then use SplashTop, a SuperOps.ai integration for remote access, to change the setting.
SuperOps.ai competes against incumbents like Kaseya (and Kaseya-owned Datto), ConnectWise, NinjaOne, Syncro and Atera. Some, like Kaseya, Datto and ConnectWise, have been around for years. Parthiban says “companies like these have typically built their platform piecemeal, or have acquired smaller players and forced these separate tools to fit together.”
As for newer players like Syncro and Atera, Parthiban said their offerings are more complicated and less intuitive to use than SuperOps.ai.
He added that companies like Kaseya make money though multi-year contracts that auto-renew and are difficult for customers to break. SuperOps.ai wants to give a more appealing alternative with an SaaS model that lets customers pick a monthly or annual plan and stop anytime they want.
SuperOps.ai also announced today it has brought on Juan Fernandez, the co-author of “The MSP Handbook” and an industry veteran, as its channel chief. Fernandez will be in charge of working with SuperOps.ai MSP clients to make sure they are getting value out of the platform.
Parthiban said one of the main reasons SuperOps.ai raised a new round is because it is investing heavily in R&D. “Much of the focus is on furthering our AI capabilities, he said. “One of the misconceptions around AI is that it is a feature. Integrate with a generative AI tool and auto generate some questionable scripts and boom that’s an AI feature. We don’t believe that. We firmly believe that AI is an underlying technology.”
Some examples of what SuperOps.ai’s AI framework will be able to do in the future include reducing the number of repetitive and recurring tickets by learning from historic responses, taking information from its knowledge base, collecting details from its RMM and prompting customized correct responses for technicians to review before sending out. It will also help maintain assets by monitoring the risk of it breaking down based on historic data and predicting the right time for maintenance.
In a statement about March Capital’s investment, vice president Ravi Rajamony said, “We are excited to partner with Arvind and the team at SuperOps as they empower the MSP market with their secure, cloud and AI native platform for PSA, RMM, IT documentation, project management and network management. The SuperOps team has strong domain experience and a customer-first approach, and we believe they are well-positioned to drive innovation in the underserved MSP market.”