I’m thrilled to announce that Norwest is leading a $20M Series B financing round in Productiv, a company that is defining a new category known as Application Engagement Analytics. More on that in a bit!

I first met Productiv’s CEO and co-founder, Jody Shapiro, at the Wharton School where we were classmates back in 2009. We immediately hit it off with our mutual interests in entrepreneurship and terrible dad jokes.

Beyond the shameless puns, I was drawn to Jody’s intellectual curiosity, his passion for technology, and his sincerity. I legitimately had one of those “I-have-to-work-with-this-guy-one-day” moments, and when he teamed up with Ashish Aggarwal and Munish Gandhi to start Productiv, I was totally convinced NVP needed to back the company.

After Wharton, Jody went on to spearhead Google Analytics, the largest marketing analytics platform in the world. His work there enabled you to measure every customer interaction on your website and then turn that data into actionable insights. Productiv is unlocking the same value, but for enterprise software usage. By discovering and illuminating how employees are using SaaS software, Productiv is arming CIOs with the unprecedented capability to measure productivity gains in their organization.

NVP has had a front-row seat to the transformative nature of SaaS and cloud. The SaaS software market is now a $100B market! The cloud has ushered in tremendous benefits to CIOs, but for every market transformation, new challenges emerge:

1. Those subscriptions add up! SaaS costs have spiraled out of control. Licenses are being underused and wastage is rampant.

2. The inmates are in control. The CIO used to own software purchasing in a centralized function. Nowadays cloud spending is spread out across multiple regions and departments. Individuals signing up for SaaS subscriptions on credit cards further exacerbates things with the “shadow IT” problem.

3. Measuring ROI on your SaaS investments is a total black box. For instance, how much more productive are we as a result of adopting Slack? Should we use Slack or Teams? How does the technology behavior of my most productive department compare to my least productive one? Until now, it was impossible to measure this.

Productiv’s application engagement analytics approach to managing SaaS solves these problems. It goes beyond just managing costs to producing a true understanding of how your employees are engaging with SaaS apps. Productiv helps CIOs accurately evaluate costs and understand employee engagement levels. The result is more intelligent application usage, improved employee adoption and engagement, and increased business performance and profitability.

Productiv has assembled a first-class team from the best technology companies in the world. I’m excited to be partnering with Jody, Ashish, Munish, Steve Loughlin at Accel, new investor Okta, and the entire team at Productiv!