When cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS launched Cloud Software Marketplaces a decade ago, a new sales channel for Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) companies to reach the front of potential business customers has been opened. These markets have allowed SaaS companies to bypass traditional long sales cycles.
However, the experience on the seller rarely takes a walk in the park. Listing software in these marketplaces requires multiple engineers, and the fictitious burden only increases as the size of the company.
Jon Yoo and Chengjun Yuan know the issues well from their respective times working at Salesforce and Confluent. They decided to start a company. Sugermitigates operational challenges related to sales through the cloud marketplace.
Suger is a toolkit that automates SaaS product lists across a variety of markets and manages these lists while scaling up. The platform’s unified APIs are integrated with corporate billing, customer relationship management, and other existing tools.
Yoo said sugar can be useful for a variety of cloud market-related tasks, including flexible pricing, revenue reporting and providing buyer insights.
“We’ve built a workflow so that these people can coordinate all of these actions as daily work,” Yoo told TechCrunch. “Like each node, let’s automate each part of the transaction lifecycle to help with large transactions. It’s really starting to play. Looking at our data, customers on average, Switching from our internal solutions or competitive products to us will reveal that we have an average marketplace volume of three times more.”
The Suger was launched at the end of 2022. Since then, the company’s customer base has grown to over 200 companies, including Snowflake, Concept, and Intel.
Suger recently raised a $15 million Series A round led by threshold ventures with participation from existing investors such as Craft Ventures, Intel Capital and Y Combinator. Yoo said the company received multiple term sheets very quickly because many of the investors Sugar spoke to have portfolio companies that struggle to squeeze cloud marketplaces.
Some future investors told Yoo that Suger would have a hard time raising money in this capital environment as suger was not marketing as an “AI company.” Obviously, it didn’t discourage many supporters.
“We use AI internally in our products, but AI is just a technology,” Yu said. “AI can be a fundamental technology, but what is the actual value we offer to our customers? At the end of the day, they help us to help them do their job. , I want to make sure they make up for the work they are doing.
The use of the Cloud Marketplace continues to be part of enterprise sales. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced that in the second quarter of 2025, Three of the Top 10 biggest deals in Salesforce It was closed through AWS Cloud Marketplace.
Yoo added that many young AI startups are looking at cloud marketplaces as their sales channel soon.
“It’s a massive market,” Yu said. “It’s not just a maintenance channel, it’s starting to become a really essential channel if you’re selling to businesses.”
To be clear, there is competition in the sugar sector. Some companies build their own cloud market listing systems in-house, while others turn to startups like tackle. Tackle has raised more than $148 million in venture capital and offers sugar-like capabilities.
Yu said the Sugar has the advantage of being a second mover. (The tackles were released a few years ago.) Yoo added that the Sugers go beyond the listing process where tackles are primarily concentrated.
Yu said Sugar will put in fresh funds to build the product and increase the engineering bandwidth. Ultimately, Sugers want to build tools on the buyer’s side, helping businesses procure software and manage their spending.
“[We’re] I’m really excited about the future, and not just the future of the company, but the future of the cloud marketplace,” Yu said. “We want to bring that consumer experience to B2B sales because it makes no sense to me that the Enterprise sales cycle takes two years.”
