The system of record for company software - one platform to discover, buy, manage and cancel every subscription.
Cledara's logomark, four rounded quadrants forming a single window - the company's shorthand for bringing scattered software into one view.
Ask a finance lead at a fast-growing company how many software subscriptions the business is paying for, and you will usually get a pause. The honest answer is that nobody knows. Tools get signed up on personal cards, trials quietly convert, teams buy the same product twice, and renewals arrive by surprise. Cledara was built to close that gap.
Founded in London in 2018 and now headquartered in New York, Cledara is a software management and spend platform. It gives companies one place to discover, buy, manage and cancel the SaaS applications they run on. The mechanism is deceptively simple: every subscription is paid through a Cledara virtual card, and each card feeds a live system of record that tracks cost, usage and renewal dates. What used to be a scattered mess of invoices and forgotten logins becomes a single, searchable directory.
The company reports more than 1,000 customers across 32 countries, integrations with over 5,600 software vendors, and more than 700,000 SaaS transactions processed. Its customers include Sofar Sounds, Marshmallow, CharlieHR, Jiminny, Sensat, Attio and incident.io - the kind of scale-ups where software sprawl grows fastest.
"Cledara acts as the system of record for company software, centralizing the payment and management of SaaS applications in one place."
The premise rests on an uncomfortable statistic Cledara sees in its own data: software spend among its customers rose roughly 25% over a recent 12-month stretch. When a cost category grows that quickly and stays that fragmented, someone eventually has to own it. Cledara's bet is that the owner should be a purpose-built platform rather than a spreadsheet.
Cledara was co-founded by Cristina Vila Vives, its CEO, and Brad van Leeuwen, its COO. Before Cledara, Vila Vives spent more than a decade leading operations teams in financial services while completing postgraduate work in HR, psychology, business and finance. The idea came from experience rather than a whiteboard: inside a rapidly scaling fintech, she watched software subscription management turn into a genuine drag on both operational efficiency and the wellbeing of the people chasing invoices and access rights.
She has since been named by Forbes as one of the business leaders changing the world, and Cledara has been recognized as one of the top five female-founded enterprise SaaS companies outside the United States by Pivotal Ventures and M12. The leadership bench draws on stints at PayPal, Railsbank, Caixa Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development - a blend of payments know-how and operational discipline that shows up in the product.
"Cledara came to the US because international companies were demanding to use it in the United States."
That demand-led expansion is a recurring theme. Rather than planting a US flag on the strength of a growth memo, Cledara crossed the Atlantic because its international customers wanted to use it there. The company now runs from New York, London and Barcelona.
The problem Cledara addresses has a name in IT circles: shadow IT, the software teams buy without anyone centrally tracking it. Its downstream effects are money leaking to unused tools, compliance blind spots, security exposure from orphaned accounts, and finance teams losing hours to manual reconciliation. Cledara attacks all four at once.
The differentiator: payments as the data source
Plenty of tools promise SaaS visibility. Cledara's angle is that it also owns the payment rail. Because every subscription runs through a Cledara virtual card, the platform doesn't have to guess what a company is spending - it sees the transaction the moment it happens. That closes the gap between a directory that says what should be true and a bank statement that says what actually is. Spend limits can be set per card, forgotten trials get caught before they renew, and qualifying purchases can earn cashback.
The results show up in third-party rankings. In 2025 Cledara took the top spot on G2's Small-Business Results Index for SaaS spend management - a ranking built on ROI, user adoption and likelihood to recommend rather than marketing spend.
A live record of every approved and pending SaaS tool, surfacing shadow IT across the company.
Per-subscription cards with custom spend limits and cashback, keeping payment data in one place.
Automatic invoice collection and matching to payments, wired into tools like QuickBooks and Xero.
Usage analytics that inform which software to renew, consolidate or offboard.
Virtual cards for each subscription with spend limits and cashback on qualifying spend.
Real-time cost, trend and ROI dashboards with renewal alerts.
A system of record for all software the company runs on.
Customizable approval flows and multi-user permissions.
Invoice capture and matching, integrated with accounting systems.
Vendor compliance tracking, audit trails and access management.
Cledara earns on two layers. The first is a tiered B2B software subscription: a Basic plan around $75/month for up to 20 apps, a Premium plan near $200/month for up to 75 apps, and a Pro plan from roughly $500/month for larger, custom deployments. The second is the payment layer - interchange and cashback economics generated as software spend flows through Cledara's virtual cards. Owning both the management software and the money movement is what lets the company monetize a customer as they grow, not just when they sign up.
Funding raised, by round (USD)
Bars scaled for comparison. Figures from public funding announcements.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $3.4M | Dec 2020 | Nauta Capital, BBVA Anthemis Venture Partnership |
| Series A | $20M | Sep 2022 | CommerzVentures (lead), Carbide Ventures, Massive, Nauta Capital, Notion Capital |
| Total | $24.3M+ | across 22 investors | Backers behind SendGrid, Marqeta, Salesloft, DigitalOcean |
Cristina Vila Vives and Brad van Leeuwen launch the platform; named SaaStock SaaS Startup of the Year.
Joins the 2019 accelerator cohort.
Raises from Nauta Capital and BBVA Anthemis to build out the platform.
CommerzVentures leads a round to fuel US market expansion.
Passes 1,000 customers across 32 countries with 5,600+ integrated vendors.
Tops G2's Small-Business Results Index for SaaS spend management.
Cledara sits in SaaS spend management, a category that has drawn Spendesk, Vertice, Ramp, Brex, Vendr, Zylo, Torii and Sastrify. Many of those competitors specialize - some in procurement negotiation, others in corporate cards, others in pure discovery. Cledara's position is the combination: it is both the card and the record, aimed squarely at growing startups and SMBs rather than large enterprises. Its off-pitch presence is unusually visible too - the company holds naming rights to Cambridge United FC's ground, The Cledara Abbey Stadium, and is a technology partner of the UTMB Val d'Aran ultramarathon.
Cledara is a software management and spend platform that lets companies discover, buy, manage and cancel their SaaS subscriptions from one place, using virtual cards and a live system of record.
It was founded in 2018 by Cristina Vila Vives (CEO) and Brad van Leeuwen (COO).
Over $24.3M total, including a $3.4M seed in 2020 and a $20M Series A in 2022 led by CommerzVentures.
More than 1,000 companies across 32 countries - mostly growing startups, scale-ups and SMBs, used by finance, operations and IT teams.
Through tiered B2B SaaS subscriptions plus interchange and cashback economics from the virtual-card payments running through its platform.