Bellini Capital this week made a $9.2 million Series A investment in startup TechGrid, a business workflow platform for technology service providers that aims to address MSPs’ struggle with tool sprawl, efficiency, and cost effectiveness, while creating a modern customer experience for their clients. Head of Bellini Capital and former ConnectWise founder Arnie Bellini told MSP Success last week that these are problems he is intent on solving for the channel.
“If you’re running a business, you should be able to choose the tools that you’re using, and those tools should be interoperable,” says TechGrid founder and CEO Philip Wegner (pictured). “That’s the vision that Arnie has, and we share that same vision.”
A Way To Scale An MSP Business
TechGrid orchestrates and streamlines workflows for selling, fulfilling, and managing IT solutions delivered to businesses. The goal of the platform, according to TechGrid, is to make it much easier for business customers to consume technology, and for tech service providers to scale their businesses.
An industry veteran, Wegner’s previous technology service provider company was SecurEdge Networks, where they initially developed the TechGrid solution for their internal use. “If you think about how customers want to buy, it’s online and an Amazon kind of experience, and we couldn’t even get tracking information to our customers when we were selling them something,” Wegner explains.
Wegner says he showed the software to some of the big OEMs like HPE and some other big companies “and they all said, ‘hey, you guys really need to just focus on the software because the industry has the problem. It’s not just you.”
Wegner sold SecurEdge in 2021 to another MSP. He then spent time rearchitecting the software for commercial use; built integrations with TD SYNNEX, Ingram Micro, and other tech distributors; and went through SOC 2 certification. TechGrid officially launched this February. The funding from Bellini Capital will help evolve and scale the platform to add features MSPs need, says Wegner.
A Look At The Platform
TechGrid’s business automation platform comprises three components:
- Marketplace – Like the Shopify App store, MSPs and resellers can customize the solutions they offer, manage delivery, and turn on new services and applications to sell.
- Workflow Software – TechGrid has a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) engine with embedded finance, making it easy to combine hardware and licensing, services, applications and internet access into a subscription model.
- Commerce – The commerce platform centers around a digital catalog that stores products, services, apps, and internet access for the MSP to build solutions and sell via traditional channels (quotes) or through online stores.
MSPs “are usually selling the customer something from Ingram Micro, something from TD SYNNEX, along with [their] own managed services,” says Wegner. “So you would go to our marketplace, you would connect all the apps that you’re currently using, and then you would be able to sell essentially digitally through the platform. What we thought was missing in the industry is that exact functionality.”
Asked how TechGrid differs from distributor marketplaces for their own line cards and partners, Wegner says their platform sits on top of those marketplaces so MSPs and their customers can transact with all the solutions they use.
“Our industry is the IT channel and we’re selling technology solutions to customers and we’re talking about digital transformation. But when you look at the actual industry itself, it’s not digitally connected,” he notes.
Today, says Wegner, “every MSP should have their own store. They should have their own offerings that they sell to their customers, and if you go to an MSP’s website … there’s no customer experience; there’s no portal.”
That’s a big problem, he says, “because the customer can go and buy things on Amazon and get [them] right away. So we’ve got to start thinking about what’s the customer experience going to look like.”
Asked if TechGrid will be utilizing solutions from the other channel companies in the Bellini Capital family, Wegner says, “We are absolutely going to plug in a lot of the stuff that he’s [Bellini] doing and Nine Minds specifically is doing some very interesting things with large language models where you can cut down things like support tickets. But there’s a lot of other uses for Alga that we are considering.”
TechGrid is available now. Wegner says onboarding is fast because of “the automation that we’ve built into it. Once we learn your tech stack, we should be able to connect that and get you started within a few weeks.”
