We are thrilled to announce today our acceptance into Mastercard Start Path, an award-winning startup engagement program which enables later-stage tech startups such as Cledara to rapidly scale through unparalleled access to Mastercard’s technology, expertise and worldwide ecosystem of customers and partners.
Cledara joins Start Path along with 6 other forward-looking startups and will partner with Mastercard through a six-month program to co-innovate and uncover opportunities with tailored support from Mastercard experts and leveraging their worldwide brand, reach and scale.
Joining the program at this stage of our journey at Cledara is a wonderful validation of our singular focus on helping growing companies manage their software investments, and we are eager to get started!
Our conversation with the Mastercard Start Path team over the past months inspired us to continue to analyze the backdrop of the environment in which our customers operate, and what we see has only magnified over the past three years since Cledara was founded.
The SaaS revolution = SaaS chaos**
The move to the cloud over the last two decades has been nothing short of stunning: 70% of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase their cloud spend in the wake of the pandemic, and SaaS adoption is predicted to grow 42% from 2020 to 2022 alone.
Businesses have absolutely chosen to empower their teams to drive growth with their preferred software, but the flipside of this is the resulting pain companies have begun to feel with managing all this SaaS.
We’ve seen first-hand how fragmented software data across a company is the cause of tens of hours of unnecessary administrative work every month, even for relatively small companies. Worse, because no one has the full picture of the software in a business, this wasted time translates into wasted money and processes that don't scale. In fact, globally, it’s estimated that 30% of SaaS spend is wasted on forgotten, unused and duplicate SaaS. With SaaS now one of the largest expenses in most tech businesses, you can start to see the sense of urgency we feel in helping companies get a hold of their software investments.
Inclusion - across multiple dimensions**
As a female-founded and led fintech startup, at Cledara we are also very interested in the topic of inclusion across multiple dimensions. Among their successes, Mastercard’s Start Path program has built a global portfolio of elite startups with a number of female-led ventures. These women have collectively raised over $1B in capital to grow their businesses. As part of Start Path, Cledara will have first-hand insight into how Mastercard works across their organization and ecosystems to foster a more inclusive digital economy. Initiatives like Start Path Empodera, a Mastercard and USAID business accelerator focused on promoting womenʼs entrepreneurship and financial inclusion in Colombia, and Start Path portfolio companies like Ellevest, a female-founded digital-first investment platform built by women, for women, are great examples of how Mastercard is working hard to level the playing field for entrepreneurs globally.
We couldn’t be more excited to get started working with the Mastercard team to drive several strategic initiatives to grow awareness of Cledara among businesses in new geographies and work with their network of industry fintech experts to further build out our business ecosystem. We will keep you abreast of our six-month journey in the program as we actively contribute, engage and learn. Stay tuned!
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