The CEO who rewired cloud sales from the inside out
He spent years building marketplace pipelines at Airbnb and Confluent so others didn't have to. Then he quit and built Clazar - so nobody ever has to again.
There is a particular kind of credibility that comes from having lived the problem before solving it. At Confluent, Trunal Bhanse led the Lifecycle engineering organization - 26 people responsible for cloud marketplace integrations across AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously. The sprawl was real. The manual overhead was real. The engineering lift just to list a product, sync a deal, and recognize revenue across three hyperscaler environments was genuinely painful.
He filed that feeling away. Then, in January 2023, he co-founded Clazar with Aayush Bahuguna - another Airbnb engineering veteran - and built the product he wished existed while managing those integrations. A single platform. Full automation. Listing, co-sell, metering, billing, CRM sync - across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud - without writing a line of marketplace-specific code.
By the time the Series A landed in April 2024, Clazar already had 100 paying customers. By 2025, that number crossed 250. The platform now earns 4.9 stars on G2 from 83+ verified reviews. That is not hype. That is what happens when the person building the solution has personally felt the friction they are eliminating.
Cloud marketplaces are not a trend Bhanse is chasing. He spent years living at their intersection with enterprise software sales. Now he is building the infrastructure layer that makes them accessible to every SaaS company - not just the ones with the engineering headcount to absorb the complexity.
"We're undergoing a generational shift in the way software is bought and sold, and Clazar is helping to catapult the entire industry forward." - Trunal Bhanse, CEO, Clazar
Cloud marketplaces - AWS, Azure, GCP - have become the preferred procurement channel for enterprise software buyers. The problem: getting there requires significant engineering investment in listing, billing, metering, co-sell, and CRM integration. Clazar builds that infrastructure so SaaS companies can focus on product.
Create and manage listings across AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single dashboard. Multi-cloud listing without the multi-team headcount. Atlan reduced co-sell opportunity creation from 5 minutes to under 1 minute.
Automated opportunity creation from CRM, real-time deal synchronization with cloud providers, and co-sell workflow built directly into Salesforce and HubSpot. No manual submissions, no spreadsheets.
Usage-based billing, metering, private offers management, and real-time revenue analytics across all cloud channels. The financial plumbing that takes months to build in-house, delivered out of the box.
1000+ pre-built connectors and no-code workflow automation for reseller offers, cross-cloud listing, and buyer journey analytics. Non-engineering teams can manage marketplace operations without filing tickets.
Most founders pitch a market. Trunal Bhanse pitched a scar. Specifically, the scar from running cloud marketplace integrations at Confluent - a company with the engineering resources to absorb the complexity, but not without real cost. His 26-person team managed the lifecycle of Confluent's presence across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Every time a cloud provider changed its API, every time a billing spec shifted, every time a co-sell workflow needed updating - that landed on his team.
The problem was not obscure. Every SaaS company selling enterprise software eventually faces the same wall. Cloud marketplaces have become where enterprise procurement happens. Buyers want to use their existing cloud commit. Sellers need to be where buyers are. But getting there requires the kind of infrastructure work that takes months and a dedicated team to maintain.
Bhanse left Confluent knowing exactly what the product needed to look like. He recruited Aayush Bahuguna - a fellow Airbnb alum and IIT Ropar graduate who had scaled payroll processing to $10M daily at Zenefits - as CTO. Together, they built Clazar in 2023 with a straightforward thesis: automate the entire cloud GTM lifecycle so that any SaaS company, regardless of size, can sell through cloud marketplaces without hiring a specialist team to do it.
The market responded immediately. One hundred paying customers in year one. That kind of velocity does not come from cold outreach - it comes from building something that solves a problem the market was actively searching for a solution to. Supabase, which reduced its AWS Marketplace operational effort by 80%, signed on. Atlan, which created 30% of its annual co-sell targets in just two months using Clazar, became a case study. Rootly automated co-sell submissions it had been handling manually.
The April 2024 Series A - $10M from Ridge Ventures, Ensemble VC, DST Global, The General Partnership, and Twin Ventures - validated both the company's traction and the size of the opportunity. Cloud marketplace third-party software sales are projected to reach $45 billion by 2025, scaling to $163 billion by 2030. That is a 29% compound annual growth rate. Bhanse is not building for a niche. He is building for the default.
"The engineering effort and resources required to get started on cloud marketplaces have traditionally been high even for enterprises, and often prohibitive for startups and smaller companies, creating a barrier to entry. But the channel is increasingly critical for success." - Trunal Bhanse, CEO, Clazar
He wrote DropTalk's entire iOS app and Chrome extension alone. Before managing 30 engineers at Airbnb, he was the engineer. That hands-on grounding shows in Clazar's product decisions - no feature without a real use case, no abstraction without a customer problem behind it.
Bhanse does not just sell Clazar - he publishes the definitive guides on cloud GTM, co-sell automation, and marketplace strategy. The Clazar blog has become a reference resource for SaaS GTM teams navigating hyperscaler sales.
He hosts a podcast series interviewing GTM leaders at companies like Metronome. He appeared on The Ultimate Guide to Partnering (Episode 227), and was featured alongside Wiz and Astronomer leaders at AWS re:Invent 2024.
Clazar was not built alone. Bhanse and CTO Aayush Bahuguna share a decade of overlapping context - both Airbnb alums, both with engineering management experience, both with the specific pain of scaling marketplace infrastructure. The co-founder fit is not incidental.
From managing 30+ engineers at Airbnb to leading a 26-person lifecycle org at Confluent, Bhanse scaled teams before he scaled a startup. He knows the difference between a product roadmap and an engineering plan - and the cost of confusing the two.
His stated aspiration: make cloud marketplace distribution accessible to every SaaS company, not just the ones with a dedicated marketplace engineering team. Clazar's pricing and onboarding are built around that north star - not enterprise-only, and not a consulting engagement.
Bhanse regularly shares his thinking on cloud GTM, co-sell strategy, and marketplace automation through podcasts, interviews, and conference appearances.
Trunal discusses how Clazar approaches marketplace automation - the engineering decisions, the product philosophy, and why the hyperscaler channel is fundamentally different from traditional software sales.
Watch on YouTube →A 55-minute deep dive on co-sell strategy, cloud marketplace mechanics, and how Clazar is rethinking the GTM motion for B2B SaaS. One of Bhanse's most comprehensive public conversations on the topic.
Listen to Episode →Trunal and Aayush Bahuguna discuss the founding principles behind Clazar - the market signals they saw, the pain points they identified at Confluent and Airbnb, and the thesis behind what they are building.
Explore Podcasts →