No money for shelves

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly newsletter about startups and markets. It is inspired by the TechCrunch+ daily column from which it takes its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Register here.

Too many subscriptions? Many of us feel this, and so do businesses: in a downturn, cutting unnecessary spending is more important than ever. Is this why SaaS management solutions have become ubiquitous? Let's explore. —Anna

“The proliferation of SaaS is a natural consequence of the SaaS revolution,” TechCrunch contributors Mark Settle and Tomer Y. Avni wrote in a guest column last November. Paying for and managing a myriad of SaaS subscriptions may come naturally, but it's still a headache for businesses, which is probably why solutions to help them manage this issue are popular among investors.

This week alone, UK SaaS management company Cledara announced $20 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch's Paul Sawers reported. This follows previous pre-seed and seed rounds, bringing the startup's total funding to date to approximately $24 million.

As strange as it may sound to write this, $20 million isn't a ton of money in our weird little world anymore. But Cledara's Series A round was closed in a downturn. And it's the SaaS management category as a whole that VCs are betting on: several Cledara competitors have also raised remarkable amounts of venture capital over the past two years.