Baltimore startup pivots Salesforce product to help companies save cash
Founded by: Guy Tawney
Year founded: 2024
Headquarters: Baltimore, MD
Sector: Cloud-based software
Funding and valuation: N/A
A Baltimore founder is relaunching his company's platform to show Salesforce users where to ditch unnecessary licenses.
Era, founded by Guy Tawney in 2024, originally housed an automated time-tracking app in Salesforce that showed how long users spend on different pieces of data to identify workflow issues and employee performance. Now, as of July, it's become a tool to audit Salesforce licenses and help customers figure out which ones they actually need. These licenses give users certain degrees of access to the enterprise software giant's platform.
The goal is to help companies save cash, per Tawney.
'We're addressing what I think is one of the biggest common complaints, or biggest issues, people have with Salesforce,' Tawney told Technical.ly, 'the price tag.'
The entrepreneur previously created Lanvale, a separate company founded in 2008 that also focuses on Salesforce by providing automation, project management and UI services for the software. While a different entity, the firm's seven employees, including contractors, also work for Era, per Tawney.
Era's technology identifies what licenses in Salesforce are not being used and recommends which users can be moved to less expensive licenses by evaluating a 'very large web of details,' including which files and data are accessed, Tawney said.
An economy in flux pushes companies to cut costs
The US economy is shrinking as of the first quarter of 2025, and consumer spending is slowing. Ongoing trade wars have business owners on alert, too.
That's why a cost-saving tool is important now, Tawney said. He credited these circumstances, along with customer feedback and the flexibility afforded by not taking funds from outside investors, with spurring Era's pivot. His primary customers are large enterprises, although he declined to name specific companies.
While he's identifying places where Salesforce would not make as much money from its consumers, Tawney is not concerned about any tension between his company and the San Francisco-based cloud computing titan.
Era is a Salesforce partner and independent software vendor, per Tawney. The product is native to Salesforce and gets distributed through its app exchange, which is similar to the app store on an iPhone, Tawney explained. He even uses Salesforce's coding language, called Apex.
The tech is valuable to Salesforce itself because customers will be happy to save some funds, he believes.
'Helping their customers optimize their licensing structure or cost,' Tawney said, 'is going to end up being a benefit to Salesforce in the long run.'
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