professional-services-automation
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CMap and the high cost of spreadsheet hell
A growing professional services firm can win the work and still lose the margin. CMap connects the quote, the people and the invoice - and is betting its next chapter on AI that knows the business.
FinancialForce Put the Back Office Inside Salesforce - Then Outgrew Its Own Name
It began with a lonely cloud-accounting product and a blunt idea: stop making sales and finance argue over two databases. Seventeen years, a near-$1 billion buyout, and one overdue rebrand later, FinancialForce is now Certinia - and the original architectural bet still explains both its appeal and its limits.
Syncro’s Bet: Charge for the Technician, Not the Machines
Most IT platforms meter every device. Syncro bets a lean technician should be able to manage thousands - and keep the margin. Here is where that math sings, where it squeaks, and what an MSP can copy.
Deltek Built a $2.8 Billion Business Out of the Work Generic ERP Avoids
Government contracts, architecture jobs and consulting engagements do not behave like boxes moving through a warehouse. Deltek spent four decades turning that awkward fact into a durable software franchise.
Rao Adavikolanu Still Markets Like an Engineer
Before he ran marketing teams, Rao Adavikolanu wrote software. Twenty-seven years later, his playbook still begins with the same question: can the system prove it works?
BQE Had a Hit Billing App. Then It Bet $25 Million on Architects’ Messy Back Office.
The software company began with a garage-built fix for timecards and invoices. Thirty years later, its sharper idea is that architecture and engineering firms should not need a scavenger hunt to learn whether a project made money.
The Software That Runs the Companies That Run Your IT
Most people have never heard of ConnectWise. But if a small business somewhere fixed your laptop last week, the outsourced IT shop that did it was probably running on ConnectWise software.
Pendo and Rocketlane Split the Onboarding Job
Two products wear the onboarding label, but they solve different moments. Rocketlane organizes the human work before value arrives; Pendo helps users find value after they enter the product.
Onboarding Is Where SaaS Quietly Wins or Dies
Baton, GUIDEcx, Rocketlane and Whatfix are four of eight startups chasing the same ugly truth - most customers churn in the first 90 days, long before anyone thinks to look.
Planhat
The Swedish company spent seven years bootstrapping a customer platform before the venture money arrived. Now it wants software agents and the humans who run accounts to work off the same page.
Rocketlane Bet That Customer Onboarding Was Broken
Three Freshworks alumni built a professional services platform on a simple hunch: the messy weeks after a deal closes decide whether customers stay. A decade later, that hunch has raised $105 million.
GUIDEcx
Trust is earned in onboarding. Make your client onboarding more visible, more engaging, and more durable with GUIDEcx.
Kantata
Kantata is a cloud software company that builds a purpose-built Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform for services organizations. Formed in 2021 through the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications and backed by Accel-KKR, Kantata unifies project management, resource planning, time and expense tracking, billing, business intelligence and increasingly agentic AI so that consulting firms, agencies and other services businesses can scope, staff, forecast and deliver client work profitably. The company serves more than 2,000 organizations across 100+ countries, including Deloitte, Sage, Hitachi and NTT Data.
Michael Speranza
Michael Speranza is the CEO of Kantata, the professional services automation software company formed in 2022 from the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications. A Rensselaer-trained electrical engineer who began his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before pivoting to Deloitte Consulting and then a two-decade run inside private equity backed software companies, Speranza has specialized in scaling mid-market B2B software firms from roughly $100 million toward $1 billion in revenue.
Alejandro Castellano
Alejandro Castellano is the co-founder and CEO of Caddi, a Seattle AI startup that turns a screen recording of someone doing their job into working, API-driven automation - a method the company calls 'record-to-code' or 'automation by demonstration.' Born in Lima, Peru, where he wanted to be an inventor, he started his first company at 19, learned to scale businesses inside a family office he calls his 'on-the-streets MBA,' then earned a master's at Cornell Tech focused on computer vision and machine learning. Caddi emerged from the AI2 Incubator and raised a $5M seed round in 2025 to free lawyers, accountants and financial advisors from repetitive back-office work.
Rocketlane
Rocketlane is an agentic Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform built to run the entire client-facing project lifecycle - onboarding, implementation, resource management, and financial oversight - in one collaborative workspace. Founded in 2020 in Bengaluru with a U.S. presence in San Francisco, it now serves more than 750 customers including Forbes Cloud 100 companies, and in March 2026 raised a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners to build out Nitro, its AI agent layer for services delivery.