The company teaching software to give directions

Every company has a drawer full of software it barely uses. A licence for the analytics suite nobody opens. A rollout of a new HR system that generated more support tickets than it saved. The finance chief signs the cheque, the vendor demos beautifully, and then the thing lands on real desks and the questions start: where do I click, what does this field mean, who do I ask. Userlane, a company founded in Munich in 2015, built its entire business on that gap between buying software and actually using it.

Its pitch is unusually plain for an enterprise-software company. The mission, printed on its own site, is three words: make software simple. In practice that means a layer of interactive, step-by-step guidance that sits on top of applications people already use - SAP, Salesforce, Workday and hundreds of web tools - without changing the underlying software. When an employee opens an unfamiliar screen, Userlane walks them through it, one highlighted step at a time, in the flow of work rather than in a training room they will forget by Tuesday.

The founders - Hartmut Hahn, Felix Eichler and Kai Uhlig - like to tell that origin story, and it is a good one because it explains the product better than a feature list would. On a mountain trip they got lost, and the conversation drifted to a simple frustration: a car has a GPS, a hiker has a map, but the software people use for eight hours a day offers no sense of direction at all. Early brainstorming happened by the Eisbach, the Munich river where locals surf a standing wave. The founding charter, as the company tells it, was signed at Marienplatz in the middle of the city. Userlane has stayed in Munich ever since.

01 / What it actually doesTwo halves of the same problem

Userlane's product splits into two parts that answer two different questions. The first is Application Intelligence: which of the applications we pay for do people actually open, and how well are they using them. It discovers the apps in use across an organisation, measures adoption through a framework the company calls HEART, and gives IT a portfolio-level view to decide where to spend on licences, training and support. The second is Contextual Assistance: the in-app help itself, delivered through the Userlane Assistant, interactive workflow guidance for the fiddly multi-step processes, and an engagement layer of announcements, surveys, form checks and automatic translation. Crucially, all of it is authored without code, so the people who understand the process - not just engineers - can build the guidance.

02 / Who pays for itThe regulated end of the market

Userlane sells to large organisations, and it has been deliberate about which ones. Its focus is regulated industries - healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, financial services, energy and utilities, and the public sector. These are places where "just Google it" is not a real answer, where a mistake in a workflow has compliance consequences, and where a workforce of tens of thousands cannot be flown to a training day. The named customer list reads accordingly: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, the NHS, Vodafone, Deutsche Bahn, Zurich Insurance, Celonis, Allianz, Beiersdorf, Linde and SAP itself, which is both a customer and one of the platforms Userlane most often guides people through.

03 / The problem, in numbersSoftware nobody uses is expensive

The problem Userlane targets is sometimes called shelfware - software that gets bought and then sits unused. It is a quiet, expensive line item, because the cost is not just the wasted licence. It is the support desk fielding the same how-do-I question a hundred times, the productivity lost while people improvise, and the transformation project that stalls because the tools it depends on never got adopted. Userlane's argument is that you cannot fix what you cannot see, which is why it leads with measurement.

The company has raised roughly $16 million across a 2016 seed round, a 2018 Series A and a €10 million Series B in 2020 led by Five Elms Capital, with earlier backers Capnamic Ventures, High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Commerzbank's main incubator returning. That is a relatively lean cap table for a company competing with far better-funded rivals, and Userlane has leaned into it, positioning itself around fast deployment rather than sprawling feature sets.

04 / How it makes moneySubscriptions, and the ROI conversation

The business is straightforward B2B software-as-a-service. Userlane sells annual subscriptions, typically scaled by the number of applications, the size of the user base and the scope of the deployment, with implementation and customer success wrapped in. Independent estimates put its recurring revenue in the region of $12 million a year, though the company does not publish the figure. What makes the commercial model work is not the pricing sheet but the argument attached to it: because Userlane measures adoption, it can frame itself as a cost the buyer recovers rather than a cost they absorb. Fewer support tickets, less classroom training, sharper decisions about which licences to renew. In a procurement meeting, "here is what you stopped paying for" is a stronger line than "here is a new feature."

The expertise underneath all of this is narrower and deeper than it looks. Building guidance that reliably sits on top of software you do not control - across constantly-updated web apps, single-page interfaces and heavyweight systems like SAP Fiori - is a genuine engineering problem, and doing it without code so non-engineers can maintain it is harder still. Userlane has spent a decade on exactly that surface, in exactly the industries where the stakes are highest. Linde Engineering, for instance, runs Userlane on SAP Fiori alongside other web applications; the platform's real-time prompts sit on top of tools like SAP, Salesforce and Workday without touching the software beneath.

05 / The fieldWhere it sits in a crowded market

Userlane plays in the digital adoption platform, or DAP, category - software that overlays other software with guidance and analytics. It is not alone. WalkMe, which went public before being acquired, and Whatfix are the heavyweights aimed at large enterprises; Pendo comes at the same space from the product-analytics side; Apty, UserGuiding and Userpilot round out the field. Against that lineup, Userlane's differentiation is less about having every possible feature and more about speed and focus: guidance that can go live in days rather than weeks, a no-code authoring model, and a deliberate concentration on regulated industries where adoption failure is most costly.

The market itself keeps validating the category. G2 has named Userlane a top leader in the digital adoption platform category, and it appears in Gartner's peer-review coverage of the space. Those badges matter less than what they signal: that "getting people to actually use the software" has graduated from an afterthought into a budget line with its own vendors.

06 / What's nextGuidance moves into the AI layer

The most interesting recent move is where Userlane is pointing its assistance. In 2025 the company launched an enterprise-grade AI Assistant, including an integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The logic is consistent with everything that came before: as the interface to enterprise software shifts toward AI, the place people get stuck shifts too, and help should live where the work happens. Userlane has also expanded a partnership with PwC around measuring and accelerating adoption inside large transformation programmes - the kind of engagements where a stalled rollout is measured in millions.

There is something quietly contrarian about the whole enterprise. In a market that rewards feature checklists and enterprise sprawl, Userlane keeps returning to a three-word mission and a hiking metaphor. Ten years on, the bet is the same one made by three friends who took a wrong turn: that the software people use all day should, like a good map, simply tell them where to go next.