Celebrating 10 Years of Zylo: Reflecting on the Past, Building for the Future

Zylo officially turned 10 this year! 

A lot has changed since our early days, and we are incredibly proud of the world-class company and client-driven culture we’ve built along the way. Over the last decade, SaaS management has evolved from an emerging idea into a critical, established enterprise discipline. It’s been an unforgettable journey, so we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the milestones that got us here and look ahead at where we’re going next.

A Decade of Firsts

A decade ago, SaaS management didn’t exist as a software category. When Zylo launched in 2016 with a $3.3M seed round out of High Alpha Studio, we had a simple thesis, a handful of believers, and a lot of ground to break.

Today, the world’s most innovative Global 2000 brands trust Zylo to manage their software and AI investments at scale. But looking back at the milestones that got us here, they were the foundational building blocks for where the industry is heading next.

• We’ve been building with AI from the beginning. Our leadership began in 2017 with the industry’s first machine-learning discovery engine. While others are just starting to build their models, we’ve spent nearly a decade training ours, processing more than $2T in spend to date to create an unmatched intelligence engine.
• We brought the entire industry together to learn. Committing early to sharing our insights and helping peers connect, we created the industry’s first dedicated SaaS management event (SaaSMe) and its very first podcast (SaaSMe Unfiltered). Together with our annual SaaS Management Index, this strong foundation of shared knowledge and peer support is carrying us into our next chapter.
• We earned the industry’s highest validation. We’re proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms three years in a row. When Gartner launched its inaugural report in 2024, we saw it as a powerful confirmation that the category we spent years building had officially arrived. Today, we believe this ongoing recognition proves our product vision and execution are well aligned with where the market is heading next.
• We built trust that lasts. Industry titans like Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Intel CIO Cindy Stoddard backed our vision early on, helping make Zylo the trusted standard for how modern enterprises manage their technology. Many of our very first clients from a decade ago are still with us today.

“What builds trust is consistently connecting our work back to the outcomes leadership actually cares about: dollars saved, risk reduced, and time given back,” said Cory Wheeler, Co-founder and Chief Client Officer. “Our ten-year clients have seen that compounding proof made renewal after renewal. We’ve built around what they actually needed, growing right alongside them from the early days of SaaS management into today’s complex conversations around AI spend.”

“Looking back to 2016, the first thing we set out to solve was SaaS sprawl--how to actually find it all. We quickly centered on using financial data as the most accurate and complete way to find all the software. We followed the money,” said Ben Pippenger, Co-founder and VP of Strategic Partnerships. “We had to build the corpus of data to train and power our machine learning discovery process long before AI had become mainstream. Today, our discovery models have classified over $75B in AI, SaaS, and Cloud spend. It’s the largest trained spend discovery model in our category and continues to be a huge value for our clients ten years later as they tackle AI sprawl.”

Every milestone of the last ten years was preparation for the shift happening right now.

Ten Years of Preparation for a New AI Frontier

If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that the fundamental rules of managing technology don’t change, even as the technology itself undergoes a massive shift. Many of the hard-won lessons that carried us through the SaaS explosion are the exact truths required to navigate the AI frontier:

1. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Ten years ago, the challenge was shadow IT and rogue spend on hidden SaaS applications. Today, it’s shadow AI: rogue spend on hidden AI apps and the pricing volatility that comes with it. The technology has changed, but the core challenge remains identical: Who is spending, on what, how much, and how do we get it under control? Absolute visibility is always step one.
2. Data is the only defense against volatility. Static spreadsheets could never keep up with SaaS renewals, and they certainly can’t keep up with real-time, consumption-based AI billing. To prevent budget shock, you need leading indicators that let you act before the money is spent.
3. Optimization is continuous, not a one-time project. In the SaaS era, annual license cleanups were a starting point, but true optimization required constant oversight. Today, we see that AI requires that same discipline, but even more so. Because usage fluctuates daily, preventing waste requires automated, always-on controls.
4. Decentralization always wins. Embrace it; don’t fight it. In 2016, IT departments tried to ban shadow IT with limited success. Today, trying to ban unauthorized AI tools is likely to produce the same result. True governance means protecting the business with guardrails while allowing teams to move fast safely.
5. The best solutions are built with the community. Listening to the day-to-day challenges of our practitioner community is how we solved SaaS management, and it’s exactly how we are building the tools to solve the complexities of AI spend today.

From the People Who Know Zylo Best

We wouldn’t be celebrating ten years without the people who got us here. Whether we’re crushing miles in the Zylo 500, rolling up our sleeves together on the Cultural Trail, or catching a Pacers game during ZKO, the bond at Zylo runs deep. 

To get a true sense of that culture, we asked a few of our longest-tenured team members to share what it’s really like behind the scenes, and why they’ve chosen to grow their careers here.

“What’s kept me at Zylo since 2016 is the people I get to work with and the problem we’re solving. Beyond having amazing coworkers, our clients are wildly impressive practitioners and genuinely great people—I've gotten to build real working relationships with them. And the problem we’re solving is exciting because it never stops evolving. We get to make our clients look like heroes when they walk into their leadership meetings reporting seven-figure savings for the year.” —Thom McCorkle, Sr. Strategic Account Executive | Joined Zylo in 2016

“One thing that has never wavered in my nine years at Zylo is our focus on putting the client first. It’s one of our core values and truly permeates into everything we do. As engineers, we’re always striving to make our product as intuitive and useful for the clients as possible. With every decision, we’re asking, ‘What would be best for the clients?’” —Morgan Kasture, Staff Software Engineer | Joined Zylo in 2017

“From day one, Zylo has been STACKED with people that combine hard work with intelligence, a desire to deliver for clients, and a willingness to take big swings. Over the last 10 years, Zylo has been built by people who desire to lead this market and innovate new ways to deliver much-needed value at the enterprise. This is just one reason Zylo boasts a list of clients most dare dream of.” —Chad Hinen, Sr. Director of Implementation | Joined Zylo in 2017

“The biggest reason I’ve stayed at Zylo is the people and the culture. When I joined as a mid-level engineer just a couple of years out of college, I was fortunate to work alongside engineers who took the time to mentor me, shared their knowledge openly, and created an environment where everyone wanted to see each other succeed. Now that I’m in a leadership role, I do my best to mentor and support other engineers so they have the same opportunities to learn, grow, and succeed that I did.” —Joey Rader, Director of Software Engineering | Joined Zylo in 2018

Built on Shared Trust

When we look back at the last ten years, the overwhelming feeling is gratitude. We certainly didn’t build Zylo in a vacuum, and we are here because of a massive, shared effort:

• Our clients, past and present, who trusted a startup when this discipline was entirely new, and who continue to challenge us to innovate.
• Every employee, past and present, who brought their talent and dedication to Zylo to help define what this category could actually become.
• Our investors, who believed in our vision from the early days and provided the fuel and partnership to help us scale.
• The partners who expanded what was possible through integrations and ecosystem collaboration.  
• The community (the analysts, practitioners, podcast guests, and SaaSMe attendees) who turned SaaS management into a true strategic discipline.

“I’m incredibly proud that what started as an idea shared by a handful of people is now an entire category that companies budget for, hire for, and build strategy around. Hundreds of Zylos took a leap on us, grew with us, and built professional paths that outlast any single product milestone,” said Wheeler. “But none of that happens without the consistent grind. Winning quarter after quarter for a decade without the team’s commitment ever wavering is what actually built everything else.”

Thank you for pushing the boundaries with us. You built the foundation that allows us to look toward the next ten years with so much anticipation.

Looking Ahead: Managing the Future of AI, with AI

Software is undergoing a fundamental shift, moving away from the era of predictable, seat-based licenses and entering a world driven by highly volatile AI and consumption spend. 

For CIOs, this new reality brings critical challenges: massive blind spots around AI spend, both present and future; the daily toil of digging through scattered, unattributed data; and the lack of governance needed to safely scale AI across the enterprise. 

As we look toward Zylo’s next chapter, our focus is building the agentic future of SaaS management to solve these problems. We’re embedding AI to make software management effortless, while building the financial guardrails for the massive spend that AI itself is creating.

“Zylo has been built for this moment. Every organization in the world is racing to adopt AI while struggling to manage costs and prove ROI,” said Scott Dorsey, Executive Chairman. “Zylo's technology platform and team of experts are perfectly positioned to help enterprises gain visibility into usage and costs, drive attribution to teams and projects, and ultimately measure business impact. This new AI tailwind will be powering Zylo and our remarkable clients for the next decade plus.”

Technologies replace one another and pricing models will continue to evolve, but our core mission remains the same: to enable enterprise organizations to optimize their software investments and drive desired business outcomes. If you think the last decade was exciting, we can’t wait to show you what’s next.