The Spreadsheet That Counted the Software Nobody Owned

The most expensive line in a software budget may be the one no one remembers buying. At Zemanta, a marketing technology company, product and engineering executive Dusan Omercevic kept a spreadsheet of the cloud tools his colleagues used. It was a reasonable solution until the spreadsheet became its own little job. He automated it in his spare time. Cleanshelf grew from that experiment.

This was a business built on an odd modern bargain. Software as a service made purchasing wonderfully easy. A team could choose a tool, put it on a card and begin work before the IT department learned its name. The same freedom scattered ownership. Finance saw payments; security saw logins; procurement saw contracts; managers saw people asking for another license. None had the whole picture. Cleanshelf’s answer was to join those partial views and give somebody a list they could act on.

The spreadsheet had a blind spot

A spreadsheet can record what a company knows it owns. It cannot reliably discover the trial converted to a paid account in a side team, the duplicate collaboration tool, or the contract due to renew before anyone examines usage. Cleanshelf connected to finance systems, single sign-on, human resources, contract repositories and software vendors to surface those cases. It tracked licenses, reported monthly usage, flagged renewals and showed spending by department. A 2019 OneLogin integration, for example, used access logs to compare paid seats with actual activity.

That is more specific than “cut software costs.” The platform gave CIOs and CFOs a common object to discuss, while procurement could prepare for renewals and security could find tools outside approved login flows. The economic model was enterprise SaaS sold to organizations with enough subscriptions to justify a dedicated management layer. A reliable public list price for Cleanshelf’s platform is unavailable. For buyers, the test was whether recovered spend and better oversight would exceed that contract price and the work of connecting their systems.

The distinction matters. A cancellation is only a saving if a team can still do its work. Cleanshelf was useful because it put the evidence beside the decision: the invoice, the seat count, the access pattern and the renewal date. LeanIX later said customers saved an average of 15 percent of SaaS spend in the first year. That is its reported average, not a promise that every company would get the same result.

Ljubljana built it; San Francisco sold it

Cleanshelf’s roots were European. Its earliest version began in 2016, and the company was incorporated in Delaware under the Cleanshelf name in 2017. Omercevic looked to the United States for larger customers. According to FounderPartners, he had five clients and just $200 in monthly recurring revenue when he met the firm’s Brian Flynn. The partnership helped establish a US legal entity and arrange more than twenty customer discovery meetings in Silicon Valley. Those meetings refined the offer, the pricing and the sales approach. This was hardly an inevitable ascent; it was a small company learning what buyers would pay to stop guessing.

Engineering and product work remained centered in Ljubljana, while the commercial side operated from the San Francisco area. Farlan Dowell, described by investor Dawn Capital as Cleanshelf’s co-founder and chief revenue officer, brought Silicon Valley sales experience. By 2020 the company had customers including AT&T, Harry’s, CoStar and Looker. FounderPartners later listed Hilton among more than 100 clients. That mix says something about the product: its audience was not a single industry but any sizable organization whose software estate had escaped the central inventory.

An independent 2020 SaaS management market report judged Cleanshelf strong at discovery, cost control and contract management. It noted broad ways to find applications, including finance, SSO, HR and security data, and highlighted integrations with contract repositories. The same report found less depth in SaaS operations and employee experience. That is a useful boundary: Cleanshelf was particularly compelling when a company’s first problem was visibility and waste. A buyer whose main problem was employee onboarding or app administration might have wanted a different mix of tools.

“Building a better tracking spreadsheet was never the vision.”Dusan Omercevic, on the LeanIX acquisition

The category arrived with a bill

In March 2020, Cleanshelf closed an $8 million Series A led by Dawn Capital with LAUNCHub Ventures. The round followed rapid growth; LAUNCHub later described nearly tenfold annual recurring revenue growth in 2019. Then the pandemic made enterprise buying less predictable. The company hired while other firms pulled back, growing from roughly 15 to 40 people, but its previously promising sales pipeline weakened by summer. For a sales-led enterprise product, that is the first failure that matters: the forecast stops behaving like the forecast.

The investors’ account also describes a second change. At first, competitors were reassuring; they proved that SaaS management was a real category. Then rivals raised much larger rounds. A pioneer with a sound product could still be outspent in a race for distribution. This is the part of the story worth copying carefully: category validation can turn into a capital requirement. The company began to consider a strategic partner rather than simply spending harder to win a market it had helped define.

LeanIX supplied a logical home. Its application portfolio management software mapped the systems an enterprise knew about. Cleanshelf could automatically discover SaaS purchases that escaped that map. In March 2021, LeanIX announced the acquisition. At that point it said Cleanshelf had more than 3,000 integrations and managed $700 million in customer SaaS spend. The buyer turned the technology into LeanIX SaaS Intelligence in May, offering discovery and cataloging alongside its architecture product. Omercevic took a product leadership role and continued to lead the Ljubljana office.

A useful habit survives the brand

Cleanshelf’s brand receded into LeanIX. SAP completed its purchase of LeanIX in 2023. What remains interesting about Cleanshelf is the operating habit it promoted: before buying or renewing a tool, put four things on one page. Find every payment to the vendor. Count the people who can log in and those who do. Read the contract and its date. Name the person empowered to keep, reduce or replace it. No single step is glamorous. Together they can expose an expensive fiction: the belief that somebody else is already watching the shelf.

That method works best where many teams buy cloud tools independently and where finance, identity and contract data can be connected. It is less powerful when spending is already centralized, licenses are few, or usage data is too thin to interpret. A login count, after all, cannot tell you whether a rarely used tool is essential on the day it is needed. Cleanshelf’s more durable lesson is to make the argument visible before making the cut.