Software Firm Zuora To Acquire Together Fund-Backed SaaS Startup Togai

California-based subscription management software company Zuora is acquiring Chennai-based SaaS metering and pricing platform Togai to enhance its monetisation suite.

With Togai’s metering and rating solution, Zuora will help unite developer and finance teams to launch, iterate and adapt their usage-based offerings, the latter said in an X post. 

“Today marks the dawn of a new era in monetisation where our two worlds come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. In simpler words, Zuora has announced its intent to acquire Togai, and together we will not only continue to be indispensable to the CFO but become the developer’s best friend as well,” Togai cofounder and CEO Abhishek Rajagopal said in a blog post.

The deal is expected to be finalised this month and is subject to customary approvals and closing conditions.

Founded in 2022 by Rajagopal, Aravind Sriraman and Tholkappiyam Velavan, Togai provides a usage-based billing engine for monetisation of large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Togai’s low-code builder and developer-friendly interface helps developers and finance teams work together to model any type of pricing and scale it up with a solution that can be easily integrated into their existing data stack.

Togai’s metering system enables enterprises to ingest events directly from their LLM query APIs and implement tier pricing based on model complexity, such as text, image, speech, and multimodal.

Togai claims that by leveraging its self-service interface, developers can build a usage-based billing system in a matter of hours, which can handle up to a billion AI transactions in a single day and enable faster resolution of customer complaints.

“Togai’s sophisticated metering and rating extends Zuora’s market-leading monetization suite to accelerate usage-based models,” said Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora.

Once the deal is finalised, Togai’s metering and rating solution will be incorporated into Zuora’s existing product suite alongside Zuora Billing, Zuora Revenue, Zuora Payments, Zephr and Zuora Platform.

“Developers spend months building internal metering and rating systems, which can quickly evolve into a dedicated team of engineers as companies realize that building a usage-based billing system is not a one-time effort. Togai makes it possible to go live in hours with an out-of-the-box, flexible solution to model any type of pricing and reliably scale,” said Togai cofounder and CEO Abhishek Rajagopal.

The development comes at a time when the Indian SaaS industry is flourishing amid increased digital adoption and a global shift towards cloud-based services.

As per a report by Mckinsey, the Indian SaaS industry is projected to grow to $50-70 Bn by 2030 from $7 Bn in 2020.

It’s pertinent to note that mergers and acquisitions in the Indian startup ecosystem dropped to 123 in 2023 as compared to 240 in 2022.