SaaS service management startup 4me raises $1.65 million in seed funding to accelerate growth in the US and UK

SaaS service management solution startup, 4me, today announced it has raised $1.65 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. The new financing will be used to accelerate its growth, primarily in the U.S. and the U.K. The company has raised over $1.7 million in funding to date. Founded in 2010 by team of service management experts: Cor Winkler Prins, Laurens Pit and Mathijs Sterk, 4me allows organization’s internal and external service providers to collaborate seamlessly, while the level of service that each party provides is tracked in real time. 4me provides Service Integration and Management (SIAM) capabilities that dramatically improve the success of selective outsourcing. Its enterprise-class IT service management application is built around SIAM specifically for multinational organizations.

In 2017, 4me was accepted into Alchemist Accelerator, the top program specialized in enterprise SaaS startups. Since then, the Palo Alto-based company has drawn much attention for its unique focus on enabling outsourcing. “Organizations are selectively outsourcing more and more services that were historically provided by teams within their IT, HR and Finance departments,” said Cor Winkler Prins, CEO and co-founder of 4me. “They need a solution that provides real-time information about the performance of their managed service providers, and these providers need a more efficient way to collaborate with their customers. The number of services that companies combine to support their core business continues to grow. It is already normal that the IT support organization of an enterprise is responsible for more than 100 services. There is no way they can hire and retain the expertise needed to support all these different services, so they selectively outsource. 4me helps them control this complexity.”

As organizations go through their digital transformation, their employees expect to be able to obtain support whenever they get stuck. Whether they have a question about their pay stub, need help with an IT issue, or have a contract that needs to be reviewed by legal, they should be able to get the support directly from their smartphone. Their requests should automatically be routed to the responsible service provider, which can be a team within the organization or an external service provider.

“4me is the first enterprise service management tool built specifically to support SIAM, the Service Integration and Management approach that is rapidly gaining in popularity,” said Arun Penmetsa, Partner at Storm Ventures. “It addresses the need that organizations have to manage multiple levels of service providers (their local support departments, their regional shared service centers and their managed service providers). They need to present them as one business-facing support organization. And with 4me they can continuously optimize the growing share of the budget that is allocated to outsourcing.” What set 4me apart from the competition are key differentiators such as service integration & management (SIAM), ITSM & ESM, speed & ease of use of its solutions, collaboration & autonomy.

In January 2018, the company decided to change its name from ITRP Institute to 4me.  Cor Winkler Prins, CEO of 4me, gave two reasons for the change. He said: “Most customers already use ITRP for much more than just IT support. That is why we wanted to get rid of the ‘IT’ in ‘ITRP’. It turns out that ITRP sounds a bit technical for the employees who use Self Service. In the end, ITRP is there for them. We wanted to express this in the name and also in the URL of the service. Currently, the employees go to a URL like infravision.itrp.com. After the name change, the employees of new customers will go to infravision.4me.com”