Meet Primo, a French startup that lately raised a $3.4 million funding spherical to construct a software-as-a-service product that handles the IT wants of small and medium corporations. Primo retains observe of your fleet of gadgets and may then make it easier to handle it and not using a devoted IT supervisor.

Headline and World Founders Capital are main the funding spherical, with a number of enterprise angels additionally taking part, resembling Arthur Waller, Romain Niccoli, Ilana Elbaz, Josef Bovet, Mathieu Birach and Romain Libeau.

Small corporations often don’t have a devoted IT crew. They have a tendency to rent their first IT supervisor after they attain 200 or 300 staff. Earlier than that, it’s a large number. Some individuals within the crew are “fairly good with computer systems” and may repair minor points. For heavy-duty duties, corporations typically depend on outsourced IT.

When there’s a brand new rent, somebody from the HR or admin groups will ensure that the brand new worker has every part they should get began. It typically entails ordering a brand new pc, including a reference quantity to a spreadsheet, emailing the outsourced IT particular person in order that they’ll grant entry to inner instruments, and so forth.

“The complexity of IT has fully modified — it has turn into operational. When somebody joins the crew, there are 35 duties to do,” Primo co-founder and CEO Martin Pannier advised me. It’s a time-consuming course of and chances are high the duty listing just isn’t even updated.

An IT companion

Primo desires to be the companion SaaS for small corporations. It at present has 4 completely different modules that ought to velocity up and rationalize IT duties.

“Everybody has turn into an unintentional IT supervisor. It has a number of benefits. One, it’s free. Two, it’s tremendous agile and responsive,” Pannier stated.

First, Primo can simplify how your organization manages laptops and different gadgets. As a substitute of ordering from completely different web sites and manually retaining observe of gadgets in a spreadsheet, Primo customers can order new laptops from Primo’s dashboard.

As Primo is linked to a number of HR data programs, it’s straightforward to see which laptop computer belongs to which worker. This module is free and acts as the highest of the funnel relating to buyer acquisition for the SaaS platform. Primo prospects pay the retail worth for brand spanking new laptops whereas the startup takes a minimize due to wholesale pricing.

Second, Primo helps you handle gadgets remotely. For this module, the corporate works with Hexnode, a cell system administration (MDM) firm. However as an alternative of showcasing a ton of choices to the top prospects, Primo is specializing in the wants of small corporations.

The default configuration is already fairly opinionated and will cowl the overwhelming majority of use circumstances. The laptop computer show is locked after 5 minutes, native storage is encrypted by default, computerized updates are enabled, and so forth. Prospects also can use Primo’s MDM module to deploy apps on the staff’ laptops.

Third, Primo has a safety module with Subsequent-Technology Antivirus options (NGAV) and end-point detection and response (EDR). As soon as once more, the corporate is partnering with one other firm to deliver these options.

Lastly, Primo additionally provides help options. In that case, if an worker has an issue as a result of they spilled some water or their laptop computer acquired stolen, Primo handles all repairs and replacements with next-day loaner gadgets and a few insurance coverage protection.

Up subsequent, the startup desires to deal with software program IT. Massive corporations typically depend on an identification and entry administration product like Okta to ensure that everyone has entry to the suitable instruments — and that former staff can’t entry Slack anymore.

But it surely’s extraordinarily complicated to implement. “Okta addresses corporations from 250 to 300,000 staff. However 99% of their efforts go in direction of the 5,000 to 300,000 phase,” Pannier stated.

Some corporations depend on Google’s single sign-on characteristic. However that requires some improvement and guide configuration. As a substitute, Primo goes to depend on Auth0 (an organization that was acquired by Okta) for his or her entry administration merchandise. However that’s not stay simply but.

Basically, Primo is a part of this new pattern of SaaS startups that bundle a bunch of merchandise in the identical platform. The concept is that issues ought to be straightforward and easy for small corporations. They don’t need to take care of 4 completely different distributors if an organization can already cowl 95% of their wants.