microsoft-365
(26)
The Most Valuable Ad Space Nobody Bought
Opensense made a business out of the few square inches beneath every employee email - part brand rulebook, part miniature ad network, and part lesson in finding value where everybody else has stopped looking.
Grey Matter knows where the cloud bill hides
The Devon software specialist built its business helping developers buy the right tools. Four decades later, its work reaches from forgotten Azure resources to the maps inside delivery apps.
Tikit turns “just a quick question” into a ticket
Cireson’s service desk puts structure inside Microsoft Teams. Its customer stories reveal why the hard part of IT support is often getting the request into the system at all.
Applicable does the Microsoft work nobody puts in the launch video
Splitting a 60,000-person company’s Microsoft environment takes more than moving mailboxes. Applicable has built its business around the migrations, permissions and midnight support that keep corporate life running.
M-Files Declared War on Folders. Then It Moved Into Microsoft’s House.
The Finnish software company spent two decades arguing that folders are the wrong way to run knowledge work. Its new Microsoft 365 alliance turns that contrarian idea into a practical bet on governed, AI-ready documents - if customers can handle the setup.
How a $21-a-Month PowerPoint Add-In Became Lucen Software's Four-Product Bet
Office Timeline spent 14 years making project managers look better in meetings. Now renamed Lucen, it is betting that the same trick can stretch from PowerPoint timelines to planning, process maps, and the awkward question of where everyone's time went.
The 75-Year-Old Typewriter Shop That Learned to Make IT Prove Its Work
WBM survived typewriters, photocopiers, the PC, the cloud and the help-desk chatbot. Its durable trick is less glamorous: turn every technology promise into a number a customer can argue with.
The Microsoft Cloud Has a Fine-Print Problem - Interlink Built a Business Translating It
The Mason, Ohio consultancy found its lane between Microsoft's sprawling catalog and the people expected to make it all work. Its pitch is less cloud cheerleading than practical translation: buy less, secure it properly, and get employees to use it.
The Company Betting Your Files Should Never Leave Microsoft
Nick Stamos spent two decades stopping data from leaking. His answer to the messiest problem in enterprise IT - sharing files with outsiders - is to make sure the file never actually goes anywhere.
The Backup Company That Reads Your Kids' Search History - And 7 Million People Are Fine With It
Vijay Krishna built a boring backup tool, then pointed its machine-learning at student essays and found the kids no one was watching. Here is how a Red Bank, New Jersey company turned SaaS insurance into a safety net for 1,200 school districts.
AvePoint Spent 25 Years Guarding Your Files. Now It Wants to Guard Your AI.
Two engineers coded their first product in a public library. A SPAC deal, $419 million in revenue and 28,000 customers later, AvePoint is wagering that the next great data problem is the AI you just turned on.
The Legal AI Race Is Flashy. Litera Is Betting on the Plumbing.
For three decades, Litera built tools for the unglamorous details of legal work - redlines, metadata, clauses, matters and client data. Now it is trying to turn that installed base into one connected AI platform without making lawyers abandon the software they already trust.
Plumsail
Plumsail automates document generation, web forms, and customer support for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, helping teams save time and cut manual work.
Templafy
The Danish software firm spent a decade fixing the world's messy corporate documents. Now it wants to keep the AI writing them honest.
Exclaimer
Stop wasting time on scripts, policies, and support tickets. Exclaimer automates signatures across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Exchange in minutes.
o11
o11 is a Y Combinator (W26) startup building AI agents that live inside the enterprise apps finance teams already use - Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Google Workspace. Rather than answering questions in a sidebar, its agents do the work: generating three-statement models, investment committee memos, CIMs, buyer lists, and decks from natural-language prompts. Its customers include investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, and asset managers.
Microsoft Won by Learning to Stop Being Windows
For years, Microsoft treated Windows as the answer. Its second act began when it made Windows merely one answer - and turned the rest of the company into a machine for selling picks and shovels to everyone.
Executech
Executech is a managed IT services provider (MSP) based in South Jordan, Utah, that delivers outsourced IT support, cybersecurity, cloud, and compliance services to organizations across the western United States. Founded around 1999 by Eric Montague on a 'People First' philosophy, the company grew from a one-person operation in a garage into one of the region's largest and most-awarded IT outsourcing firms, backed since 2017 by Evergreen Services Group. It supports hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of end users across sectors like healthcare, finance, government, education, and manufacturing.
BEMO
BEMO is a Redmond, Washington-based managed IT and security service provider built specifically for small and mid-sized businesses that run on Microsoft 365 and Azure. Founded in 2010 by ex-Microsoft veterans Bruno Lecoq and Joel Lachance, the fully remote company bundles cybersecurity, compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC, NIST 800-171), managed helpdesk, and AI/Copilot security into packaged tiers so 10-to-500-person organizations can meet audit requirements without hiring an in-house security team. BEMO is a repeat Microsoft US Partner of the Year and a four-time Inc. 5000 honoree.
Billables AI
Billables AI is a San Francisco startup that runs quietly in the background of a lawyer's workday, watching the email, documents, calls, and calendar entries flow past, and turning them into finished, billable time entries - descriptions and all. Founded in 2023 by a team from SambaNova, Pinterest, and Mya Systems, the company argues that law firms lose real money not because lawyers do not work, but because they forget to write down that they did. It has raised roughly $14 million across a 2024 seed and a 2026 Series A, and now sells its passive, API-based timekeeping to hundreds of midmarket law firms.
Maestro Labs
Maestro Labs is a Singapore-based productivity software company that builds AI assistants for the tools people already work in - email, meetings and calendars. Its flagship product, MailMaestro, drafts, summarizes and prioritizes email inside Outlook and Gmail, while TeamsMaestro takes meeting notes in Microsoft Teams and CalMaestro handles scheduling. The company positions itself as the largest independent AI email assistant, competing directly with Microsoft Copilot, and reached that scale partly by acquiring Helsinki-based Flowrite in January 2025.
TeamLogic IT
TeamLogic IT is a North American managed IT services provider that operates as a franchise network of locally owned, nationally backed offices. It delivers managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud, business continuity and IT consulting to small and mid-sized businesses, pairing on-the-ground local owners with enterprise-grade tools, 24/7 monitoring and a virtual-CIO advisory model. Founded in 2004 and owned by Franchise Services, Inc., the brand has grown to roughly 300+ locations and is consistently ranked among the world's top MSPs.
Nerdio
Nerdio builds software that automates and simplifies the deployment, management, and cost optimization of Microsoft cloud technologies - Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft 365, and Intune. Born as an internal tool at a Chicago managed service provider, Nerdio spun out in 2020 and now serves over 23,000 customers worldwide through two flagship products: Nerdio Manager for Enterprise and Nerdio Manager for MSP. In March 2025 it raised $500 million from General Atlantic at a $1 billion+ valuation.
Nimble CRM
Nimble CRM is a relationship-focused customer relationship management platform built for small businesses and teams. Founded by CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara — the co-founder of GoldMine Software — Nimble integrates deeply with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to automatically enrich contact records, manage sales pipelines, and enable AI-powered prospecting. With transparent single-plan pricing at $24.90/user/month, Nimble positions itself as the smart, simple alternative to complex enterprise CRM systems, serving 10,000+ customers worldwide.
Material Security
Material Security is a San Francisco cloud workspace security company that protects email, files, and accounts inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Founded in 2017 by three ex-Dropbox engineers, it assumes attackers will eventually get in - and locks down the sensitive data they came for, instead of stacking yet another perimeter.
Spin.AI
Spin.AI is an AI-powered SaaS security and data-protection company based in Palo Alto. Its SpinOne platform unifies SaaS Security Posture Management, ransomware defense, automated backup and recovery, and browser extension risk control for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack - serving more than 1,500 organizations across 100+ countries.