Infotech spent thirty years rating software vendors and had never bought one. Then it bought Bengaluru’s Zluri. Co-founder Sethu Meenakshisundaram tells us why he chose a strategic home over a Series C. Is this the front door, or a back room in someone else’s house?
Key points
- Infotech spent thirty years telling CIOs which software to buy. In October it bought Zluri, its first acquisition ever
- Zluri had raised $32 million, signed 250-plus customers and been a Gartner Leader in 2024, 2025 and 2026
- Co-founder Sethu Meenakshisundaram says a Series C was available. The founders passed
- Is a “strategic home” the grown-up choice for India’s 2020-21 SaaS vintage, or just a kinder word for cashing in the chips?
Imagine you are watching a cricket match – not the slam-bang T-20 type but “real” cricket – a five-day test match.
It is the third afternoon, nothing much is happening, and the umpire at square leg has been standing there, as umpires do, for what feels like thirty years.
Then he walks off the field, comes back wearing pads, and asks for a middle stump guard.
You would rub your eyes, right?
Well, something very much like this happened in enterprise software last month, and hardly anybody in India rubbed their eyes.
The umpire in question is Infotech.
Until October it went by the name Info-Tech Research Group, and for thirty years it has made its living telling CIOs which software to buy.
In all that time it had never acquired a company. Not one.
Its first purchase turned out to be Zluri, a Bengaluru startup that helps companies figure out which software their employees are using, and who (or, these days, which AI agent) has access to what.
So the firm that used to rate the players now owns one of them.
How did a research firm end up buying an Indian SaaS company?
And why on earth did the SaaS company say yes?
Good companies get the worst choices
Readers will remember our earlier story, on the Portkey acquisition.
It raised about $18 million and sold to Palo Alto Networks for $140 million, barely ten weeks after its Series A.
That was a dramatic sort of problem: a big cheque showed up before the founders had enough capital to say no to it.
Zluri’s problem is nowhere near as dramatic but you could argue that it is the more important one, because far more Indian founders have it.
Consider the context.
Ritish Reddy, Chaithanya Yambari and Sethu Meenakshisundaram started Zluri in 2020. Lightspeed led the Series B in July 2023, which took total funding to $32 million. Gartner named it a Leader in SaaS management platforms three years on the trot, in 2024, 2025 and 2026. It has over 250 customers and more than 100 employees.
All good numbers. By any sane yardstick, this is a good company.
And that is precisely the trouble.
India’s 2020-21 vintage is full of good companies.
They raised money at boom-time prices, built products that customers genuinely liked, and then looked up in 2026 to find that the ground under their category had moved.
The Portkey story asked whether India can fund its fastest AI companies.
Zluri poses a more awkward question.
What do you do with a perfectly good company when its market starts dissolving into somebody else’s?
Your category is somebody else’s feature
To see how the ground moved, go back to 2020.
Companies were signing up for SaaS apps much faster than their IT teams could keep count.
Somebody had to find all those apps, tally the licences, flag the dodgy ones and trim the bill.
That somebody was a SaaS management platform, and Zluri was one.
The catch is that Zluri was never the only one who could see this data.
Your identity provider knows who logs into which app. Your password manager knows which apps your people use. Your finance software sees every invoice.
It was only a matter of time before each of them said “we can do that too” and bolted on a version of the same job.
By 2026, even 1Password was selling SaaS management. And in August, Productiv, an American company in the same category, shut its platform down after giving customers all of four days’ notice.
Sethu told us Zluri heard the “won’t a platform just do this?” objection in its very first customer meetings, and it still hears it today.
His answer: “A platform wins when the buyer sees the category as a feature. We won when they saw it as a risk, because unmanaged SaaS and access is where breaches start.”
AI agents, as it happens, have made the risk argument easier to sell. Every agent a company deploys gets access to applications and data, and somebody has to know what it can touch.
At the RSA Conference in March 2026, Zluri announced an expanded identity security platform that covers employees, service accounts and AI agents.
Sethu’s one-liner for the problem: “Agents are the new employees nobody onboarded.”
If you are a founder in a category like this one, that statement requires unpacking.
When the buyer thinks of you as a line item, a platform will swallow you on price and convenience.
When the buyer thinks of you as the thing standing between them and a breach, you still have a fight on your hands.
Zluri kept dragging its product towards that second description.
Even so, a fight is a fight.
Which brings us to the buyer.
The acquirer nobody had on their list
Ask an Indian SaaS founder who might buy them one day and you will get the names from the next Gartner Magic Quadrant over. I have yet to meet a founder who would add a research firm to that list.
The usual suspects did come calling, mind you.
Sethu said that over the years security vendors, IT product companies and makers of employee productivity software all took a serious look at Zluri.
He had the same worry about each of them: “becoming one feature in a bigger suite.”
Infotech is a different animal.
It makes over $300 million a year in revenue and employs about 1,700 people. Joel McLean founded it in 1997 and is still its chairman.
On the very day it announced the Zluri deal, it also dropped “Research Group” from its name and launched something called CIO Analytics, a platform that plugs straight into its members’ IT systems.
Why would a research firm suddenly want to own software?
Because its old product is being given away.
Infotech’s own argument is that generic advice has become free, since any chatbot will write you a cloud strategy in a few seconds.
What a chatbot cannot do is look inside your company and tell you which applications you actually run and who can get into them.
Zluri’s software can.
Infotech said it bought “the execution layer rather than waiting to build it.”
According to Sethu, the part Infotech prizes most is application discovery and governance, because that data feeds the API-driven advisory it wants to sell.
Under the arrangement, Zluri stays a standalone product, gets distribution through Infotech’s network, and (with customers’ authorisation) supplies operational insights that inform Infotech’s advice.
Or as he put it: “I’d rather Zluri is central to a company’s strategy rather than a supporting feature in its portfolio.”
But there is a bigger point hiding in here for anyone drawing up a buyer list.
Research houses, advisory firms, consultancies and data businesses are all watching AI eat their standard product.
Some of them will decide they need proprietary data from inside their customers’ systems, and that buying a working product along with its engineering team is quicker than building one.
For that kind of buyer, you are the plan itself.
So what did Infotech actually buy?
We tried to pin Sethu down. If Infotech could keep only one thing, which would it be: the product, the integrations, Zluri’s place inside customer environments, or the team in Bengaluru?
He wasn’t having it. “It’s like asking which wheel matters most about a car.”
To be fair, he then explained why.
The product is no use without the integrations. Visibility begins with the apps a company already knows about, which is what the integrations hook into, and only then stretches to the ones it has no idea about.
That vantage point is the real prize.
Zluri’s software runs inside customers’ environments and sees their applications, identities, access rights and spend.
With the customer’s permission, it can produce the kind of insight that no model trained on the public internet is ever going to have.
Then there is the team.
Infotech’s workforce is concentrated in Canada, and it plans to expand Zluri’s engineering group in India, possibly into a wider R&D base for the whole company.
Was diligence painful because Zluri was built out of India?
Sethu says no. It was thorough, but mostly because India was a jurisdiction Infotech had never dealt with before.
He did own up to one regret from 2020, and it is an arguably boring one, which is probably why you should pay attention to it. He would have spent more effort getting the company’s entity structure right.
If you think a foreign buyer might turn up some day, fix this at the seed stage, when it costs next to nothing.
In the middle of an acquisition, it costs months.
Walking out on Gartner at the top
Next is the part of the deal that would make most founders wince.
You cannot be an umpire and a batsman in the same match, and both sides know it.
Infotech used to run SoftwareReviews, which rated software vendors.
After the acquisition it pulled the SaaS management and identity governance categories off SoftwareReviews altogether, and its analysts will stop giving independent vendor recommendations in both.
Zluri is paying a price as well. It will no longer take part in other analyst firms’ evaluations.
Think about this for a second.
This is a company walking away from the Magic Quadrant a few months after being named a Leader for the third year running. Most startups would sell a kidney for that badge.
Is Sethu worried? Not especially, and his reasoning is illuminating.
The Magic Quadrant, he said, mattered most at the very top of the market, where large enterprises came knocking because of where Zluri sat on the chart.
But the bulk of Zluri’s business came from mid-sized and large companies that seldom open a Gartner report.
They found Zluri through customer references, partner referrals and good old outbound sales.
Those channels survive the deal. On top of them, Zluri now gets Infotech’s network of more than 30,000 IT leaders.
That is a lot of doors, though let’s be clear that it is the parent’s network, and it will come with the parent’s priorities.
Indian founders who sell abroad tend to treat analyst badges as the holy grail.
Zluri’s experience says the badge opens doors at the largest accounts, and that in the mid-market your references and partners were doing most of the heavy lifting anyway.
The Series C that Zluri didn’t raise
Which leaves us with the obvious question. Did Zluri have to sell?
Nothing in the public record says so. The price hasn’t been disclosed, but in the twelve months before the deal the company expanded its platform, presented at RSA and picked up yet another Gartner Leader tag.
This does not look like a distress sale.
It looks, instead, like a founder doing mental math that anyone who raised in 2021 will recognise.
A Series B in 2023 means Series C conversations around 2025.
At that stage investors are paying for two things: a growth curve, and a category big enough to justify a much fatter valuation.
When platforms are busy absorbing your category, the second of those is a hard sell, no matter how good the product is.
Sethu confirmed a Series C was on the table. “We chose a strategic home with distribution,” he said, “because it gave customers and the team a stronger future than another round chasing a moving bar.”
He didn’t pretend independence was impossible either. It would have needed more capital, more sales coverage and a longer slog against bundled platforms. “It was winnable, but this was the better route.”
You have to admit that the logic holds.
A sales team funded by Series C money adds reach one hire at a time. A parent with 30,000 IT leaders in its network hands you reach on the day the deal closes.
There is also a less comfortable reading.
India now funds a startup’s first $10 million reasonably well.
The Portkey piece argued that the layer above that is thin for the fast growers. For steady, well-run companies in consolidating categories, it is much thinner still.
And the employees?
Sethu wouldn’t share numbers, but said that “the people who joined early and stayed saw their belief rewarded.”
For the 2020-21 vintage, that is far from a given.
Front door or back room?
For Zluri’s customers, not much changes on Monday morning. The product is the same, the team stays in Bengaluru with a bigger remit, and there is now a parent with a network of more than 30,000 IT leaders behind it.
We asked Sethu what he would build if he were starting Zluri from scratch in 2026.
He described a layer that discovers and governs access for people and AI agents alike, however many identities a company ends up managing. He called it “the front door of control”, as opposed to a small room in somebody else’s house.
His parting advice had nothing to do with technology. AI is making software easier to build, he said, which makes deciding what deserves building more important. “The ability to build is becoming more accessible. The judgment to choose well is still yours.”
So, smart exit or polite surrender?
Our money is on smart.
Zluri’s founders looked at a queue of buyers offering them a back room, and picked the one odd buyer that needed them at the front door.
The umpire may look strange in pads, but it is Zluri that gets to open the batting.
Indian founders in shifting categories will face the same choice, probably sooner than they expect.
